From Inter@ctive Week - A contrarian view - ATM will dominate thru 2001 - TDM technology is in demand - Services move to the edge
But for all the talk of new services, some things aren't changing on the access side. The integrated access devices that new competitors are most interested in now are based largely on Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) technology, not the packet-switching
technology for which most of the industry is pushing. And since new competitors are open to new technologies only as long as they aren't hard to use or expensive, many will take a pass on Digital Subscriber Line (xDSL) and packet switching for now.
"We're interested in what's going to be the most cost-effective, and right now that's TDM-based devices," says Greg Hutterer, senior director at Ovation Communications, a facilities-based local
competitor that operates in Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and Minneapolis. " Time to market is a big part of what I'm working for."
For Ovation, that means sticking with familiar services
such as T1, or 1.5 megabits per second, access. "[X]DSL has actually slightly lower price points, but you don't get any guarantees on exact performance," Hutterer says. "[X]DSL is a somewhat new technology, and we're more comfortable with a T1. So are our customers."
zdnet.com
Carriers Look For An Edgier Edge
By Kathleen Cholewka
April 12, 1999 10:16 AM ET
Competitive service providers are looking to make
money by putting integrated access devices, chock full of network smarts, on the edge of the customer premises. Although carriers aren't offering much beyond basic voice and data consolidation so far,
virtual private networks and transparent local area network services are gaining momentum.
The push to gain a service edge at the network's edge
comes from the commodity bind threatening to tie up network operators that rely solely on selling capacity.
"What we're going to end up with is a connection
network with addresses where people contact each other, but without a lot of service identity," says Tom Nolle, president of CIMI, a consultancy. "Carriers need a service architecture. The only place you can determine services is at the edge."
Edge products that can deliver this service point of
entry come from vendors such as Carrier Access, Premisys Communications, Telco Systems, Vertical Systems Group and Vina Technologies. Big equipment suppliers have taken notice of the trend
and have begun reselling these boxes as well. Most recently, Ascend Communications, which will soon be Lucent Technologies' property, agreed to resell Telco Systems' box.
Sprint's Integrated On-Demand Network is based on
the edge intelligence architecture, although Sprint has yet to announce which kinds of integrated access devices it will use.
As more intelligence such as routing and security
moves to the edge of the network, the network core can be focused on delivering raw capacity - the so-called big, dumb core design.
Backers of this approach say it is more economical
for carriers than today's infrastructure designs, which keep a bank of features and software in one central place. And carriers are looking to get their hooks into the customer premises as much as their customers want the carrier to take care of their voice and data
networking needs.
For network operators to make this architectural shift,
integrated access devices will have to move beyond the basic tasks of consolidating voice and data traffic onto one pipe.
Market watchers say more applications are coming
down the pike. "Once you've got data and voice together, you can start to add other traffic, like fax, and shunt all of this traffic to the carrier," says Jennifer Pigg, an analyst at The Yankee Group. "Data
and even voice can be picked off and sent to the Internet."
According to Pigg, integrated access devices that use
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology, such as those from Lucent's Yurie Systems, will be able to accommodate new services first because they already deploy advances in traffic shaping and intelligent routing technology. Use of these ATM technologies has spurred the growth of transparent local area network (LAN) services, a market whose revenue worldwide is expected by The Yankee Group
to grow from $304 million in 1998 to $1.1 billion in 2001. During that period, The Yankee Group expects services based on ATM platforms to dominate, making up 76 percent of all transparent LAN service
revenue by 2001.
"Transparent LAN services have been less sexy since
there haven't been devices out there that shape the traffic, control the speed and allow service-level agreements," says Tom Murray, director of product management of the Demarc 100 line at ATM vendor
Fore Systems.
Integrated access devices that specialize in Internet
Protocol handling, such as the Access Integrator from Vina, will be used to provision virtual private networks, including security and quality-of-service features,when those features are available.
But for all the talk of new services, some things aren't changing on the access side. The integrated access devices that new competitors are most interested in now are based largely on Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) technology, not the packet-switching
technology for which most of the industry is pushing.
And since new competitors are open to new technologies only as long as they aren't hard to use or expensive, many will take a pass on Digital Subscriber Line (xDSL) and packet switching for now.
"We're interested in what's going to be the most
cost-effective, and right now that's TDM-based devices," says Greg Hutterer, senior director at Ovation Communications, a facilities-based local competitor that operates in Chicago, Detroit,
Milwaukee and Minneapolis. " Time to market is a big part of what I'm working for."
For Ovation, that means sticking with familiar services
such as T1, or 1.5 megabits per second, access. "[X]DSL has actually slightly lower price points, but you don't get any guarantees on exact performance," Hutterer says. "[X]DSL is a somewhat new technology, and we're more comfortable with a T1. So are our customers."
Smaller competitors are price-conscious about these
setups. Mark Hubel, senior field service manager at NewSouth Communications, says his deployment of integrated access devices depends on price. NewSouth is evaluating whether to lease or own the
integrated access gear it is installing at customer sites. "We have to make it cost-effective for the customer," Hubel says. "$2,000 to $3,000 per unit sounds right."
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