re: Zhone,
That's an interesting assemblage of players from the former Ascend cadre. Is there anyone left there?
I'd need to see more of their pre-game plan, and maybe their exit strategy <g>, before commenting more intelligently. But, since lack of intelligence has never been an impediment to our mind blasting here, I'll continue with some initial thoughts:
A question that crosses my mind immediately is, What is the shelf life of the legacy networking infrastructure that they would want to integrate through the use of these new wares? Zhone has addressed the zone, if I may, that we've discussed here in SI many times in the Last Mile Thread. That is, the eventual harnessing of upper layer services on the local loop and associated access platforms for the purpose of pointing them to other providers' clouds.
For example, allowing me to use my residential VoIP client (which might reside on my desktop or home router, or server, with regular black phones wired throughout my home) to "point" to a virtual CLEC using layers 2 through 4 hooks, bypassing my incumbent carrier.
This sounds attractive in theory, and would seem to be an inevitable outgrowth of IPification, but consider the administrative hoops that would need to be jumped through, in order to effect transparency to the user. (I list some of those concerns below.)
That is, it appears that they are taking the last mile loop and the central office/head end environments and creating a layered architecture that could be used for enabling users to use "upper layer" legacy voice and data services by pointing them to the providers of their choice, other than the ILEC. OR, towards the same or a different xLEC, under newer, possibly enhanced by some means, arrangements.
The problems here transcend the purely technological ones. Gateways have long been used to satisfy these generic requirements in the past. I see an equal level of complexity, or greater, in marketing those services by startups, and getting regulatory red tape out of the way. Perhaps they understand this and this is the area they are targeting for streamlining. In fact this would need to be the case.
There is the integration at the ILEC's and MSO's higher layer functions which reside in their back office systems which are there for a reason. Most notably, their directory/DNS services, service ordering & administration, billing systems (where division of revenue and other accounting processes need to take place), not to mention the "must carries" such as E911, local number portability, and global naming attributes if public access is to be achieved.
These are the areas where "electronic bonding" and other Operational Support Systems (OSSes) and their associated hot links for data interchange between new and old service providers are needed. Again, how long they will actually be needed is a question that needs to be answered, since the relentless movement towards an all IP landscape could at some point obviate many of these concerns.. and, of course, replace them with others.
Symons said the company hopes to simplify the current combinations of network technologies like cable, digital subscriber line (DSL), wireless and fiber through a single connection point, consolidating several types of technology into one box.
Others are doing this, calling themselves access layer management platforms. Redback comes to mind, as does one of NT's 1999 acquisitions, whose name slips my mind (would someone refresh?).
Another aspect of this story that crosses my radar is the freedom with which these ex-ascenders seem to be able to start new companies in the same field. Are non-compete clauses in takeout terms no longer fashionable these days, or is there something else happening here which is blinded from our vision?
Those 1970 legacy platforms which some of the ILECs now have in place, and the later HFCs with 1997 head end architectures wont be there for exploiting, forever. And gateways (at whatever layer) between legacy and next gen architectures are only transitional ones, by definition. They had better have plans to invoke early jettisoning of their launch boosters, and have some view of future directions, if they hope to enter a viable orbit.
Frank |
