Has anyone seen this article from PC Week on AT&T - $1Billion order?
zdnet.com
Services take a converged turn at ComNet
PC Week Headlines
Supreme Court upholds FCC on Telecom Act
By Paula Musich and John Rendleman, PC Week Online
January 25, 1999 9:00 AM ET
Network equipment vendors and service providers this week will take the wraps off a multitude of new wares and services that blend voice and data.
At the ComNet show in Washington, 3Com Corp. will begin shipping its TCITS (Total Control IP Telephony System). The three-tiered platform consists of IP gateways, gatekeepers and back-end servers.
The architecture works with the company's Total Control remote access switch to enable service providers to bypass circuit-switched telephone networks and route voice calls over IP networks. Prices depend on configuration.
One potential 3Com customer is AT&T Corp., which is expected to place an order worth more than $1 billion for TCITS, said sources close to 3Com, in Santa Clara, Calif.
Hardware maker Ascend Communications Inc. will unveil an agreement with San Francisco ISP (Internet service provider) Surfree.com Inc. under which the ISP will use Ascend's MAX access switches and B-STDX, CBX 500 and GX 550 core ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) switches to resell wholesale Internet transport services from PSINet Inc., said Ascend officials in Alameda, Calif.
GTE Internetworking, for its part, will launch its IT Telecom Group, which is developing enhanced IP fax services and low-cost IP voice offerings. Pricing has not been determined, said officials at the Irving, Texas, ISP.
Other service-related announcements at ComNet will include the following:
MCI WorldCom Inc. will unveil its Interact Web-based electronic billing application, which provides corporate IT managers with a view of commercial data services, online network monitoring and management, electronic bill analysis, and payment capabilities, said MCI WorldCom officials in Jackson, Miss. The application is free to customers.
Sentient Networks Inc. will do its part to hasten the merging of voice and data traffic across WANs with its new Ultimate C2X 1600 access device. Officials of the Milpitas, Calif., company said that the device provides up to 1,260 DS-1 connections for standard circuit emulation services over ATM and integrates the functions of costly digital cross-connect systems. The device costs about $950 per DS-1 connection.
Meanwhile, a new VPN (virtual private network) startup called Network Alchemy Inc. will be on hand to introduce what officials of the Santa Cruz, Calif., company claim is the first scalable VPN offering for large enterprises and service providers to support millions of concurrent users.
Network Alchemy's new proprietary operating system, dubbed DaveOS, can cluster as many as 255 VPN servers. DaveOS will run on Network Alchemy's own servers, which will ship next quarter, starting at $50,000.
To help administrators better monitor their own enterprise networks, Wavetek Wandel & Goltermann Inc. this week will debut a next-generation version of its Domino protocol analyzer that promises to greatly reduce the cost of troubleshooting across large, heterogeneous networks.
DominoPlus is a chassis-based protocol analyzer that can quickly and easily accommodate up to nine interface modules covering more than 20 high-speed network interfaces, according to officials of the Research Triangle Park, N.C., company. A configuration with an ATM DS-1 interface is priced at $15,000; the Ethernet interface, capable of full-duplex, full-line-rate protocol capture, costs $5,000. Later modules will support FDDI and 25M-bps ATM connections.
General Datacom Corp. will demonstrate a new ATM network terminating unit that interconnects enterprise Ethernet LANs with ATM WAN services. The new AT-1000e is available now for $7,465, said officials in Middlebury, Conn. |
