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From a Forbes article (11/98 I think)------------>
Who'll end up on
first?
Forget the "last mile." The real key to unraveling
the revolution in the broadband market is to be
found in the new kinds of networking devices
that sit deeper in the network infrastructure.
Loosely called "Subscriber Management" devices, or
aggregation routers, these products are supplied
today by a group of small startups including
Redback, Torrent and Redstone. Redback, with
clients like UUNet, GTE, and Concentric among
others, "has sold several hundred units and is
starting to make headway in the very biggest
accounts," according to the company's vice
president of marketing, Larry Blair.
"But it is not the geeky, network connection part of
this equation that really counts. The real issue is
that our SMS 1000 [the company's product, which
supports up to 4,000 simultaneous high-speed IP
connections] can enable carriers, telcos, services
providers, anyone in the data or Internet space to
offer a whole new set of additional services. For
instance a local telco can let a customer select from
any of dozens or hundreds of ISPs, on the fly. Or an
ISP can provide a long list of enhanced ISP-related
services like security, or video, or different channels,
all hosted across the Internet, all priced at different
points, all instantly, even simultaneously, selectable
by different family members, and all provided by
different service providers."
"it is not the geeky, network connection part of
this equation that really counts."
Currently leading this DSL aggregation market with
75 employees, and about $20 million in venture
money from Accel Partners, Sequoia Associates,
and The Mayfield Fund among others, is Redback.
Starting with a blank sheet of paper, Redback
founder Gaurav Garg and his team decided that the
opportunity in the new broadband data market was
not on the end-user side, where there was far too
much competition. Instead the band of networking
veterans tackled the infrastructure requirements for a
world where lots of people would have high-speed
data links, and the suppliers of those links would
need a way to manage all that data traffic. Using
off-the-shelf components to build their products, the
company was early to market and has parlayed that
into a strong presence. Now, however, some other
small startups are coming after them and starting to
offer silicon-based systems that promise to have
better performance and might prove more scalable
than Redback's.
At the same time, the usual suspects--Cisco, 3Com,
Ascend and Lucent--all seem late to market, and,
according to UUNet's McManus, really aren't
competitive yet. This won't last, because the
economic opportunity is too great, and the chance to
bolt this kind of high speed subscriber management
offering onto a router is too compelling for those who
make their money selling the routers. However,
Redback's Blair is sanguine about his company's
prospects. "Look, we interoperate great with all of
Cisco's gear," he says, before laughing at the
audacity of his comment. "Since most of the Internet
is dominated by their equipment, that is really a
survival issue for us. But our pitch is really simple.
You can buy all Cisco equipment, and get a
high-speed access infrastructure that is just like
today's low-speed network--or buy our gear, have it
work perfectly with all the existing routers in the
network, and have a chance to offer an almost
unlimited number of new services no matter how big
or small you might be."
In the brave new world of the Internet, it is the new
service model that will likely win. |
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