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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jach who wrote (19198)	11/9/1998 11:48:00 PM
From: jach	Respond to of 77397

IBM to charge for QoS patents By Sandra Gittlen Network World, 11/09/98 IBM raised industry eyebrows last week by telling the IETF that the company will charge licensing fees for pending patents that pertain to the Multi-protocol Label Switching quality-of-service (QoS) specification. By requiring other vendors to license technology, IBM could slow deployment of MPLS and drive up MPLS equipment prices. IBM's move could also reduce the benefits of the specification because developers might choose not to implement IBM's technology if they have to pay for it. Additionally, IBM's action could lead to nonstandard implementations of MPLS, thus defeating the specification's overall purpose. MPLS defines a standard way to steer IP traffic through the Internet over predefined routes, providing predictable performance, and thereby helping to guarantee IP QoS. "The [Internet Engineering Task Force] will have to get used to patented technology," says John Tavs, TCP/IP technology manager for IBM in Research Triangle Park, N.C. "As long as patents are legal in the U.S. and networks are important to business, then patents will play an important role in the standards process. The Internet community has to decide how it's going to responsibly address patented technology," Tavs says. "Our intent is not to delay deployment of MPLS products," he adds. "It's only to raise the awareness of possible infringement." Sharp criticism voiced Critics say IBM's stance flies in the face of the open standards process. "I will not be paying any money to IBM," says Hemant Kanakia, CEO of router start-up Torrent Networking Technologies in Silver Spring, Md. "We can develop whatever technology we need ourselves." "MPLS is supposed to be a networkwide standard," he adds. "As soon as a company starts charging money for it, the standard is dirt and people will stop using it." Tavs would not disclose how much IBM will charge or what specific technology falls under the company's pending patents. The company's Aggregate Route-based IP Switching (ARIS) technology is part of the specification, along with Cisco's Tag Switching technology. Cisco, however, is not charging anything for its contributions. IETF Chairman Fred Baker says patent claims are not new to the IETF, and that a company only has to disclose the fact that it has filed for patents or holds them to be in compliance with the standards process. Move could backfire "Intellectual property in its own right is not a problem," Baker says. But by complicating a standard, the company may force implementers to seek alternative methods for carrying out the specification, he says. "If there are two equal technologies, they will go for the unencumbered one." "If IBM puts too high a price on the license, then it could affect MPLS implementation," says Atul Kapoor, managing director of The Tolly Group, a testing and research firm in Manasquan, N.J. "Even if it's a small amount, it could start adding up on a large number of pieces of equipment." Kapoor says Cisco's Tag Switching and IBM's ARIS are not interchangeable. "Tag Switching maps labels to packets; ARIS provides route aggregation. An MPLS implementation would be lacking without route aggregation," he says. Tom Downey, Cisco's director of product marketing for the Enterprise WAN business unit, says IBM's patent claims are part of the IBM's "Old World" attitude. "In the New World of networking, patents are there to horse trade and cross-license, not to make money." May hurt start-ups He adds that the smaller vendors - the start-ups - are going to be the ones affected because the larger vendors can just swap patents with IBM. "If you are a small company, you are not going to pay a lot for a patent - because you can't," agrees Tony Rybczynski, director of strategic marketing and technologies at Nortel Networks. One way that the start-ups can offset the cost of patents is to charge more for their products. "Depending on the price that IBM is socking vendors with, users will see it in the price of equipment," says Mel Beckman, chief technology officer for the Systems and Software Consortium, an ISP in Santa Barbara, Calif. Beckman says he already has to pay an extra 7% more for his Cisco routers with SNA capabilities because Cisco licenses SNA from IBM. Beckman adds that he believes IBM is going against the nature of open standards. "Vendors bring their technology to the table to promulgate standards for interoperability, not to feather their nests," he says. "I'd be worried about standards that could get set and then vendors get the money for it. Proprietary interests stifle innovation. It's not healthy for the open standards process." Kanakia says IBM is doing itself harm by putting up roadblocks. "I'd be very surprised if anything proprietary to IBM makes it into the final spec." "To put something out as a standard, you should understand that you'll get the credit, but you give up your proprietary rights," Beckman says. IBM representatives say the company has patents pending for other technologies as well, including the Open Shortest Path First Protocol and the Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol. =================== this is very significant news. The last paragraph where IBM has patents pending for OSPF can be a big hit for all router companies especially csco. Maybe that's why csco was down today in an up market and considering the upgrade to strong buy. IMO, look for csco to go down substantially when this news hit a much broader audience.

To: jach who wrote (19198)	11/10/1998 12:02:00 AM
From: jach	Respond to of 77397

-OT- MCI WorldCom's frame net face lift By Denise Pappalardo, Tim Greene and David Rohde Network World, 11/09/98 If you are an MCI WorldCom frame relay customer, brace yourself for what could amount to a monumental change. MCI WorldCom is close to signing a $50 million deal with Ascend Communications for nearly 70 Ascend CBX 500 switches that will be used to give MCI's 100,000-port HyperStream frame relay network a face lift. While neither MCI WorldCom nor Ascend would officially comment on the deal, sources say the carrier will be adding the Ascend gear in the frame relay backbone. Until now, the backbone has been primarily based on Bay Net-works' BayStream devices. Nortel Networks, which acquired Bay a few months ago, has confirmed it will discontinue production of the BayStream line, which is based on Bay's Backbone Concentrator Node routers. Regardless, MCI WorldCom will continue to work with Bay on its frame relay network, a spokeswoman says. Carl Baptiste, Nortel's router platform product line manager, says the company will still support existing BayStream customers - which include Bell Canada and Concert - but Nortel Passport is the company's carrier data platform of choice. The Bay products will be used as edge devices on large enterprise networks. Some experts believe the Ascend contract was in the works prior to WorldCom's acquisition of MCI and Nortel's acquisition of Bay. But whether the deal was born out of necessity or desire, users and analysts agree the change can be positive, if done correctly. Ascend's ability to extend service-quality guarantees from its ATM backbone to the frame relay services supported by the CBX 500 may mean more service-quality options, according to MCI WorldCom customer Ken Lund, network manager for Allen Lund transportation brokers in La Canada, Calif. "This shows a commitment to using frame relay in conjunction with ATM to improve the quality of frame," Lund says. The MCI WorldCom frame relay service Lund has been using for four years has performed well, and he even uses it to support voice, he says. MCI WorldCom hasn't been lagging behind with its frame relay offerings. In fact, MCI WorldCom was the first and only carrier to offer switched virtual circuits. But users and analysts agree that a switching platform, not a routing platform, will offer more flexibility and reliability. Ascend's CBX 500 will give MCI WorldCom the option to do ATM trunking while continuing to offer frame relay. "The company will get more robust quality of service from the CBX 500 portion of the network, and the voice capabilities of that platform are a lot stronger than the Bay platform," says Tim Smith, principal WAN analyst at Dataquest. For Bruce Friedman, network manager at Morrison and Forrester, a law firm in Palo Alto, Calif., the possibility of moving to Ascend is attractive. Potentially, MCI World-Com could offer service-level guarantees that would allow the law firm to do more than the current voice and data over frame relay. "The next thing you would want to say is, 'Can I do video?' I can see that being intriguing," Friedman says. He had toyed with using ATM to handle multimedia traffic, but says if it could all be done over frame relay, he would jump at it. One customer concern when a carrier attempts such a wholesale upgrade is billing. "Customers will have to watch and make sure they are getting the same service levels they were getting before," says Rick Malone, a principal at the Dedham, Mass., consulting firm Vertical Systems Group. "Because frames move through the network differently if you're using Bay, Ascend or Cisco, users really have to keep an eye on billing," he says. Swapping out old equipment or supplementing a legacy data network is not an easy task, but it can be done. Just ask AT&T and Sprint. In mid-1996, AT&T upgraded its backbone from Cisco's first-generation StrataCom IPX frame relay switches to broadband StrataCom BPX switches to support interoffice trunking at T-3 rather than T-1 speeds via ATM. AT&T decided to bite the bullet and move all its customers' ports to the BPX switches. But to ensure no customer traffic got lost in the shuffle, for two weeks AT&T duplicated every packet and ran two networks. Doing that provided the BPX with a real, production-level stress test for each customer's WAN. "AT&T had some scheduling issues, but everybody came out whole in the end," Malone says. By contrast, when Sprint last year installed new Nortel frame relay/ATM switches, the company created a parallel network next to its original Alcatel Data Networks backbone and made customer migration optional. The main advantage of Sprint's Nortel network is that it provides class-of-service differentiation, which lets the carrier offer lower latency guarantees for SNA traffic. This capability is not available to customers that are on Sprint's legacy Alcatel frame relay network. All new customers get Nortel ports, and some 75 existing customers chose migration to better their guaranteed service levels, says Brad Hokamp, Sprint's director of advanced data services. But the key reason Sprint was able to keep two networks going is that Alcatel agreed to maintain and upgrade the older Sprint network. MCI WorldCom may follow Sprint's model because Nortel is saying it will continue support of its BayStream product line. While new BayStream frame relay switches will not be available to customers, Nortel will support existing BayStream users for at least five years and longer in some cases, says Mark Tharby, vice president of product marketing at Nortel. ============== ASND ATM switches going to take another large contract. The other day was LU taking mkt share away also. IMO, the recent contracts' award trend do not look good for CSCO in the next six to 1 yr range.