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Non-Tech : Amati investors -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pat mudge who wrote (31274)	6/5/2000 1:59:00 PM
From: riposte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 31386

James Steenbergen: Voice On The Net This story was printed from Inter@ctive Week, located at zdnet.com. James Steenbergen: Voice On The Net Inter@ctive Week May 24, 2000 1:13 PM PT URL: zdnet.com The obvious obstacle to putting voice traffic on Internet Protocol networks is the quality-of-service issue. Chelmsford, Mass.-based Integral Access www.integralaccess.com) has proposed solving this problem by using emerging Multiprotocol Label Switching technology as a standard for voice-over-IP traffic in the access portion of the public network. The company uses the PurePacket platform to make this work. To help in this regard, Integral Access has recently hired as its chairman James Steenbergen, former president and chief executive of Amati Communications, which was one of the original Digital Subscriber Line customer premise equipment manufacturers in the industry before it was bought up by Texas Instruments in February 1998. Steenbergen stayed at TI until May 1999 and has been analyzing the industry since, looking for a great opportunity. Steenbergen spoke with Senior Writer Brian Ploskina about his experiences at Amati, the benefits of moving voice to IP and why it's better to work than invest. What was it about Integral Access, a small start-up, that made it attractive enough for you to join as chairman? What made it attractive to me was I think they're a good year ahead of people I see in the industry for designing a system for putting voice and data over the IP network where the voice isn't a patch. Voice should be designed from the beginning. Do you believe IP will be the standard someday for transmitting voice packets, and how long do you think it will be before it becomes the standard? I think the big issues have been quality-of-service issues, and the protocols are getting agreed upon to take care of that problem. I think you'll see these products will be widespread by 2001, and it'll start growing very fast and be mainstream by 2005. I've seen predictions that by 2003, something like 4 'percent' or 5 percent of the voice traffic will be on IP, and that amounts to like $3 'billion' or $4 billion of voice traffic. It will be a good-sized market in the U.S. especially late this year, early next year. It seems that people who are moving to convergence more quickly are trying to use solutions that are available today, such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode or frame relay. Once this technology is prevalent, will people be open to swapping out systems again? We think so. Why have two networks? There's definitely going to be an IP network. So why do you need an ATM network if you can do quality-of-service-type things with the IP network? How far can DSL 'Digital Subscriber Line' go in providing businesses with converged voice and data services? I think it'll go for many, many years to come. No. 1, you finally have the big elephants, the 'regional bell operating companies' finally moving 'to DSL', so they'll ride that train for a long time. And the technology is very good. In the Amati days, we had many customers that were reliably doing 6 megabits 'per second' up to 12,000 to 14,000 feet from the central office in a real network. That technology is only going to get better. What have been the main challenges in converging voice and data over an IP signal? I think the real issue has been quality of service. In the ISP 'Internet service provider' world, there weren't agreed-upon protocols, and just a few years ago, there weren't any good ways to do it. But you have to have a quality-of- service guarantee for voice, and that didn't exist, and it does now. How do you think voice-over-Multiprotocol Label Switching will fit this need for a standard in transmitting voice-over-IP? I think this is where the standards will be written around, and it does allow for the types of quality-of-service things you need and virtual private networks. All the pieces that are required to have full-featured networks are encompassed by that standard. What kind of experiences can you bring to Integral Access? I've had a general experience in the industry for over 20 years. I've dealt with many of the customers that Integral Access is going to be needing to work with. And the other piece, one of the specific reasons that the board was interested in bringing me in, was they wanted ... someone with operational experience ... someone who's started a company and got it ramped up to large-volume productions, and I've been involved with several companies that have done that. Such as Amati? I was the CEO there, brought in midway through the initial development of the product. They had developed a prototype 'Asymmetric DSL module', which was about the size of a shoebox. They had some brilliant engineering people, but didn't really have an infrastructure built in the company in terms of quality software, storage, legacy systems ? all the things needed to start a company. You left TI a year ago. What have you been doing all this time before joining Integral Access? I took a few months off and enjoyed some travel. And then I was doing some investing, which was a lot of fun ? until March. I thought I was a real hero until then 'when the market "corrected"'. And then you needed a job again? No, I planned on it. I think this is a very interesting product. And I think it's really about execution on our part.