Interesting article form newbridge News-"Inside Germany"
newbridge.com
Here are some highlights:
" I think the alternates are still in a stage where they need to prove themselves. You
still read in newspapers about big disasters in large corporate networks: for example, airline customers that
have entire booking systems go down. I think it will still take some time to establish the expertise to run big
networks and to be fully trusted by corporate customers."
What kinds of technologies and services are most popular in Germany?
From a corporate point of view, but also from a domestic perspective, ISDN services are very, very popular.
You nearly don't get around ISDN at all.
"There is a fairly unique history behind the migration of networking technologies. For example, most large
finance institutes have large X.25 networks that they base financial transactions on, like the cash machines
and these sorts of things. Very robust networks, but performance or bandwidth management are not priority
number one -- it is really the security of the network, the reliability of the network, and obviously X.25 was
designed for that. Internationally, like in the U.S., these X.25 networks have been migrated to frame relay and
then frame relay is the interim step to full-blown ATM. I think in Germany, the expansion costs have been so
high in the past that people think they can go directly from X.25 to ATM. One of the main differences is that
frame relay hasn't really grown very fast in the previous couple of years. It's just in the last few months that
we have seen a very strong uptake of frame relay because people have realized that frame relay offers with its
class of service, very similar things than ATM at a lower cost point for bandwidths below 2 Mb/s."
"What kinds of opportunities do you see in Germany for newer types of technologies such as ADSL, wireless
and distributed ATM?
Wireless broadband solutions are seen as some of the most important things for alternate carriers in
Germany because within their business cases local loop line costs are still dominant. We are in the process of
clarifying how our solution can fit in -- things like frequency availability, for example, are different to North
America. We do hope we can run at least some field trials with a number of alternate carriers some time next
year as a basis for success within this emerging market segment.
ADSL as a technology is already very well known in Germany. Even people who are not very technology
oriented can sometimes tell you that ADSL will bring you broadband Internet access and offers more
bandwidth than ISDN. Deutsche Telekom is trialing ADSL at the moment for residential and business
customers with an ATM backbone network and are most likely launching services everywhere in Germany
very soon. The pricing model for unbundled copper for alternative carriers is still fairly high at the moment
and therefore it is unclear if they are going to launch ADSL services on the local loop infrastructure from
Deutsche Telekom. Obviously the regulatory body in Germany is under pressure in this matter.
We are already installing an ADSL network in the city of Mannheim; every school is being connected to
receive broadband Internet access. Because many utility companies have copper in the ground we believe that
our solutions for businesses are very interesting." |
