A dubious honor, to be sure.
To celebrate, here's a few findings relating to SBC's upcoming announcements:
First from The Dallas Morning News:
dallasnews.com
SBC investing $6 billion to speed up Internet access
'Project Pronto' expected to pay for itself by 2004
10/16/99
By Jennifer Files / The Dallas Morning News
SBC Communications Inc., the nation's largest local phone company, plans to spend $6 billion to redesign its telephone network, industry sources said, allowing SBC to make high-speed Internet access available to 80 percent of its customers in 13 states.
SBC could sell services such as desktop video-conferencing and television services over its telephone lines. The network improvements would generate $3.5 billion in new annual revenue and pay for themselves in greater efficiency by 2004.
San Antonio-based SBC, which owns Southwestern Bell, is expected to announce the program, called "Project Pronto," on Monday. Company officials declined to comment Friday.
The investment is SBC's salvo against competition from new local phone companies, which are already using similar technology to try to lure away business customers, and from AT&T, which has invested more than $100 billion in cable networks that allow it to speed data to customers' homes.
"It's a very forward-looking kind of thing for a local phone company to be doing," said Laurie Falconer, analyst in Dallas for TeleChoice, a telecommunications consulting firm. "It puts them in a position of being very competitive - and they already have a relationship with customers."
Like other local phone companies, SBC sells access through a technology called digital subscriber line service, or DSL.
SBC began selling DSL service to Dallas-area customers in April. As of June, the company had about 32,000 DSL customers through its Southwestern Bell and Pacific Bell subsidiaries, according to an industry information service called DSL Prime.
SBC said it will upgrade its networks to allow faster communications by adding more fiber-optic cable, electronics and 'asynchronous transfer mode" equipment, all of which allow data to travel across its networks more quickly. The new equipment will make SBC's networks more efficient, generating annual savings of $1.5 billion by 2004.
SBC will upgrade part of its voice network with technology that's normally used to carry data calls, at a cost of $720 million. The company plans to test the service in Houston and Los Angeles beginning next year. Data networks carry calls more efficiently, allowing phone companies to carry more traffic over the same networks and to save money on voice network equipment.
SBC expects $3 billion in annual revenue from DSL services within the next five years, and another $500 million in sales from other new products. The $3.5 billion in revenue will increase SBC's total sales by 1 percentage point in 2004.
SBC said it expects to have 6 million DSL subscribers by 2004 and more than 10 million by 2009.
Ameritech Corp., which SBC acquired earlier this month for $74 billion, doesn't yet offer the service.
About 6 million of SBC's local phone customers were able to access DSL service as of June. Previously, SBC and Ameritech had projected increasing that count to 11.5 million by January, with 200,000 customers actually taking the service.
New technology is beginning to solve the main problem with DSL service, which traditionally only works within three miles of a telephone company central office.
GTE spokesman Bill Kula said his company is beginning to offer DSL service to a few customers who live further away from the network hubs. "That presents good news for customers who've been searching for more speed," Mr. Kula said.
GTE and Bell Atlantic, which are seeking approval to merge, expect to have about 150,000 subscribers by the end of 1999. GTE began selling DSL service to Dallas-area customers last September.
>>>>
San Jose Mercury:
sjmercury.com
Posted at 1:48 a.m. PDT Saturday, October 16, 1999
SBC maps upgrade for high-speed Net access
BY JON HEALEY
Mercury News Staff Writer
SBC Communications Inc., parent of Pacific Bell and now the country's largest local telephone company, plans a multibillion-dollar network upgrade to give more customers high-speed access to the Internet and other advanced services.
The upgrade -- estimated to cost $6 billion over the next three years -- will enable SBC to bring high-speed connections to 80 percent of the homes in its region by 2002, according to people familiar with the company's plans. The improvements also will provide a platform for high-tech voice and video services, such as movies on demand and video conferencing through personal computers.
The plans, which are expected to be announced Monday, are the latest sign of how competition in phone and data services is forcing the lumbering telecommunications giants to make dramatic improvements or gamble on new technologies. It also reflects how the popularity of the Internet is leading those companies to remake their networks for a new generation of services.
Company officials declined to comment Friday, saying only that they intend to make a major announcement Monday. But details of the plans were released to analysts, and a copy was posted on SBC's Web site.
SBC already has launched its first generation of high-speed lines in much of the Bay Area, although only a small percentage of its customers have signed up for the service. The new effort would make the connections available to a higher percentage of homes and yield even higher speeds, opening the door to new types of voice, data and video services.
Still, the planned investment may provide little relief to homes and businesses in remote or rural areas, where many customers have trouble even with dial-up modem connections, let alone high-speed links.
The first customers to benefit from the SBC upgrade will probably be heavy Internet users tired of the delays they experience on dial-up connections. The technology being deployed by SBC, known as digital subscriber line, transmits information seven to 28 times faster than the speediest dial-up modem while maintaining a continuous connection to the Internet.
That service, which costs $49 and up a month, is already available to more than 5 million homes and 900,000 businesses in California, Pac Bell spokesman John Britton said. It's also been troubled by installation problems and occasional outages, such as one that interrupted service repeatedly from Redwood City to Marin County this week.
The main competition is the cable TV companies, which offer high-speed ``cable modem' service for $40 to $50 per month. That service is available only where the cable companies have upgraded their networks, a task that AT&T Corp. won't finish in the Bay Area for at least two years.
Once those networks are fully upgraded, AT&T plans to offer a discounted bundle of local and long-distance calling, interactive cable TV and high-speed Internet connections. Because of the enormous capacity of those networks, AT&T will be positioned to offer an array of ``broadband' services -- for example, digital movie rentals, extra phone lines on demand, remote control of home appliances, and banking or shopping through the TV set.
It takes a high-capacity pipeline to provide such services, and the copper wires of a conventional phone network don't have that kind of capacity. That's where digital subscriber line technology comes in, transforming the wires into broadband pipes.
The problem for the phone companies, however, is that the high-speed phone lines slow down the farther they travel from the central-office switches, coming to a dead stop two or three miles out. SBC officials say they can push the lines as far as 17,500 feet, but that still leaves 30 percent of its customers in metropolitan areas without broadband connections.
To address that problem, the company intends to shorten the copper wires serving many of its customers. It plans to use fiber-optic cables to push the DSL equipment closer to homes and businesses, enabling 60 percent of its customers to connect at speeds more than three times greater than what it offers consumers today. An additional 20 percent will be able to connect at today's top speed, which is 1.5 million bits per second.
In addition to offering more customers high-speed service, the new network design will enable SBC to transmit phone calls as data packets, a more efficient and flexible approach than the current method, which creates direct electronic circuits between phones. Once voices are transmitted as data, callers can easily add and drop lines, incorporate video into their calls, set up conferences and exchange data files as they speak.
Although the upgrades will be expensive, SBC expects to save $1.5 billion per year in operating costs and gain $3.5 billion in revenues by 2004, Bloomberg News reported. And the $6 billion in upgrades don't represent an entirely new outlay; SBC had already announced last year it would spend $6.5 billion on its network by 2003.
Telecommunications analyst Jeffrey Kagan said SBC's planned improvements are critical to its ability to compete in the future. ``It's the kind of investment I think they need to make to protect their customer base and to launch all their future services from,' he said.
>>>>>
SBC homepage:
sbc.com
SBC and NN:
Newbridge Networks Signs Multi-Million Dollar Agreement with SBC
KANATA, Ontario, August 26, 1998 -- Newbridge Networks today announced an agreement with SBC Operations Inc. to provide MainStreetXpress 36170 Multiservices Switches. Newbridge also will provide SBC with a MainStreetXpress 46020 Network Manager and MainStreetXpress 48020 MultiNetwork Service Controller. The three-year agreement is valued at over $300 million.
"SBC's commitment to their customers' evolving needs has made them one of the world's most respected and successful carriers," said Terence Matthews, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Newbridge Networks Corporation. "Newbridge is proud to provide the network infrastructure that will enable SBC to support its customers into the next century."
The MainStreetXpress 36170 Switch's broad range of interfaces and service offerings ? including advanced private line, LAN internetworking, and broadband wireless ? enables companies to take advantage of the cost and performance benefits provided by the multiservices, multi-access platform. The MainStreetXpress 36170 Multiservices Switch offers interfaces ranging from sub-T1 speeds to OC12, growing to OC48, and features such as ATM Forum-compliant Inverse Multiplexing over ATM (IMA) and switched virtual circuits (SVCs). It scales from 800 Mbit/s to more than 50 Gbit/s in a fully redundant mode, and supports more than 30,000 T1, frame-relay or circuit-emulation ports per system.
The Newbridge MainStreet time division multiplexing and MainStreetXpress asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), frame relay products also allow for the ability to seamlessly integrate network solutions.
The MainStreetXpress 46020 Network Manager and the MainStreetXpress 48020 MultiNetwork Service Controller are highly scalable, reliable management systems that provide end-to-end network and management solutions The MainStreetXpress 46020 Network Manager is used to configure the network, manage links and paths, monitor operations and establish end-to-end connections through the network by simply clicking on end-points. The MainStreetXpress 48020 MNSC can be used by individual service providers to consolidate the management of multiple networks into a common administration, or by multiple service providers to manage services which span multiple network or service provider boundaries.
Newbridge Networks (NYSE: NN; TSE:NNC) designs, manufactures, markets and services networking solutions to organizations in more than 100 countries. The Company leverages its relationship with 16 Newbridge affiliate companies and strategic alliances with Siemens and 3Com Corporation to deliver seamless, end-to-end solutions. Newbridge customers include the world's 250 largest telecommunications service providers and more than 10,000 corporations, government organizations and other institutions. Founded in 1986, the company employs 6,000 people on five continents. News and information are available at www.newbridge.com.
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Quote from SBC on NN's 350:
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Newbridge Networks Unveils 350 Integrated Versatile Services Node
Industry's First Carrier Class, High Density, Multiservice, Multi-Access Platform Enables Service Providers to Cost Effectively Extend Broadband Service Capability from the Central Office to the Customer Edge
SUPERCOMM'99, Atlanta, Georgia, June 7, 1999 -- Newbridge Networks (NYSE: NN; TSE: NNC), a world leader in multiservice, multi-access wide area networking solutions, today unveiled the Newbridge 350 Integrated Versatile Services Node (IVSN). The multiservice, multi-access platform enables service providers to quickly and cost effectively expand their network footprint and service portfolio while maximizing return on investment and minimizing time to profitability.
The Newbridge 350 IVSN is the industry's first fully integrated narrowband and broadband services access platform designed to deliver high revenue voice, data and premium quality Internet protocol (IP) services to business and residential customers through a broad range of integrated wireless and wireline broadband access media.
Newbridge has combined its industry leadership in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) traffic management and multiservice delivery with its award-winning broadband access solutions to migrate ATM and IP to the customer edge. This enables full service convergence and maximized bandwidth utilization with full quality of service (QoS) guarantees and end-to-end network and service management.
"ATM is a key platform in the deployment of the next generation network, and clearly must move beyond the core networks of today," said Sam Sigarto, director, Broadband Network Architecture, SBC Communications Inc. "The Newbridge 350 Integrated Versatile Services Node integrates the functionality required to allow widespread deployment of ATM ultimately out to the customer edge. This development by Newbridge is in line with the SBC strategy."
"The multiservice nature of ATM clearly allows alternate carriers, such as GST, the ability to deploy a single platform as we expand our coverage. Newbridge is addressing this opportunity with the integration offered by the 350 IVSN platform, which further adds capabilities for different last mile technologies and multiservices in one solution, said Steve Hensley, vice president of engineering, GST Telecommunications. "It will be products like this that Integrated Communications Providers (ICPs) like GST Telecommunications will use for efficient expansion of networks into new markets."
"As a next generation access vehicle, the Newbridge 350 IVSN delivers greater flexibility and higher capacity and density in the same price range as single purpose network access products being offered by the competition," said Christin Flynn, analyst, the Yankee Group, the Boston-based research and consulting firm. "This high level of integration and flexibility in a single deployment platform enables service providers to quickly deploy new services with significantly reduced total cost of ownership and improved time to profitability. With this development Newbridge is definitely leading the broadband access industry into the next millenium."
The first in a series of scalable broadband multiservice platforms designed for service provider access infrastructures, the Newbridge 350 IVSN uniquely combines advanced switching, routing and service provisioning with high density digital subscriber line (xDSL), two to 42 GHz broadband wireless technologies and emerging access technologies. Designed to meet standards-based carrier building environments, the Newbridge 350 IVSN operates in standalone configuration or can be networked with Siemens / Newbridge MainStreetXpress 36170 Multiservices Switches located in the central office. The Newbridge 350 IVSN also enables emerging service providers to collocate their equipment at the sites of established carriers. With its remote node capabilities and high port densities, the Newbridge 350 IVSN expands service footprints while reducing aggregate service costs per subscriber.
Extended temperature range and environmental hardening enable service providers to deploy the Newbridge 350 IVSN within the access infrastructure ó on roofs and pedestals or in digital loop carrier (DLC) cabinets and shared equipment rooms ó despite harsh environmental conditions. The Newbridge 350 IVSN can be flexibly connected to the core network via wireless or fiber backhaul, minimizing time to commission and services delivery.
"The addition of the Newbridge 350 IVSN to the comprehensive Newbridge products and solutions portfolio enables established and new generation service providers to quickly and flexibly expand their served markets," said Conrad Lewis, executive vice president, Access Products Group, Newbridge Networks. "The platform's modular, scalable architecture allows emerging and established service providers to tailor their service offerings and method of access as their customer base and services portfolio evolves. Newbridge also delivers the creative financing and technical and business support to enable service providers to quickly and cost effectively roll out new services ahead of the competition.
"The Newbridge 350 IVSN is particularly advantageous to the more than 350 established and new generation service provider customers worldwide looking to extend their core broadband service networks based on the MainStreetXpress 36170 Multiservices Switch," added Mr. Lewis.
The Newbridge 350 IVSN capitalizes on the strengths of products and solutions from across the Newbridge portfolio. With the addition of a Newbridge Internetworking Services Card (ISC) ó a key component of the Newbridge Versatile IP portfolio of advanced IP solutions ó the Newbridge 350 IVSN enables service providers to deliver premium quality, revenue generating IP-based offerings, such as IP virtual private networks (VPNs) and electronic commerce services.
For example, the Newbridge Digital Media Distribution Service (DMDS) solution, also launched today, is fully supported by the Newbridge 350 IVSN. DMDS is the industry's first comprehensive solution that enables service providers to offer premium quality broadcast television, video-on-demand (VoD), radio and high speed Internet services using standard IP multicast protocols. The Newbridge 350 IVSN combines the support of DMDS with other advanced IP services, Internet access, high speed data, and full voice services across multiple access media. As with other Newbridge solutions, it provides full end-to-end network and service management and billing.
The 350 IVSN delivers a switching capacity of 1.6 Gbit/s and a robust feature set that includes:
12 universal card slots;
Full traffic shaping and management;
Concentrated public switched telephone network (PSTN) interconnect via GR303 and V5.2;
Support for circuit emulation, cell relay, frame relay, video, switched voice, advanced IP and local area network (LAN) services.
By sharing a common hardware and software design stream with the MainStreetXpress 36170 Multiservices Switch, the Newbridge 350 IVSN fully supports existing service and access interface cards, as well as a continuously emerging range of new higher density interfaces.
End-to-end network and service management is provided by the MainStreetXpress 46020 Network Manager, offering a wide range of advanced network and service management capabilities, enabling service providers to focus on deploying new services while reducing the associated administrative burdens and costs. The Newbridge center-weighted service management model consolidates policy administration to a handful of policy servers in the network and distributes the intelligence to enforce these policies to the network edge. Newbridge recently strengthened the management capabilities of the MainStreetXpress 46020 Network Manager to support IP-VPN services.
The Newbridge 350 Integrated Versatile Service Node is being demonstrated at Supercomm'99 in Atlanta, Georgia, June 7-10, 1999. The Newbridge booth, #7715, is located in Hall H. |
