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Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Duper who wrote (58083)	12/15/1998 12:43:00 PM
From: gbh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 61433

Former Cascade bigwigs resurface at IP start-ups By Tim Greene Network World, 12/14/98 That giant sucking sound you heard during the past year or so was the brain power streaming out of Cascade Communications in the wake of its acquisition by Ascend. Last week, a handful of former key Cascade executives re-emerged in top jobs at three well-heeled start-ups. All three companies are shooting to make all-IP carrier networks possible, just as Cascade gear made possible many of today's public frame relay networks. Cascade co-founder Desh Deshpande and former Cascade CEO Dan Smith are heading Sycamore Networks. Hassan Ahmed, former chief technology officer at Cascade, is president and CEO of Sonus Networks. Wu Fu Chen, a co-founder of Cascade who had already moved on to two other start-ups, is now chairman and CEO of Shasta Networks. The three companies focus on different parts of carrier networks, from edge to core, but have one thing in common: They plan to bring to carrier networks IP features that in the past have been reserved for enterprises. Sycamore at the core Sycamore is focused on the optical fiber at the core of carrier networks, where the company will introduce intelligence into the gear that moves packets over the fiber, Deshpande says. The company hopes to open so much bandwidth on fiber-optic strands that bottlenecks will not occur in carrier backbones. This means carriers will be able to more easily offer IP services with guaranteed quality of service. And Sycamore gear will provide that bandwidth economically, so that as optical technologies improve, carriers can afford to adopt them quickly, Deshpande says. Today, the biggest fiber links are achieved via dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) using several different colors of laser on a single fiber. But DWDM is limited because the technology is point-to-point and lacks the intelligence to route or switch. That kind of intelligence lies instead in underlying SONET technology. But in order to access the intelligence, fiber transmissions must be converted to electrical impulses, read, and then reconverted to optical signals for forwarding to the next node in the network. Sycamore technology will eliminate the need for optical-electrical conversions at each node. That capability will make SONET gear unnecessary in new networks, cutting one of the underlying costs of services, the company claims. Sonus blends old and new Sonus is working on an IP switch that can talk to current telephone switches and use existing telephone signaling to direct traffic over IP networks. It can also convert IP destination routing into telephone signals that can be understood by phone companies' circuit switches. With these signals operational, new providers can set up voice/data IP networks that can complete calls to and from the existing circuit switched public telephone network. And existing phone companies can start building IP backbones for voice and data without isolating existing networks. In addition, Sonus gateways will sport APIs that will let carriers quickly provision new types of services. Today, interfaces to switches are proprietary, making development of service-enabling software costly, says Rubin Gruber, founder of Sonus. Shasta on the edge Shasta plans to push provisioning intelligence and bill tracking abilities to the edge of carrier IP networks, says Anthony Alles, president of Shasta. In addition, Shasta gear will break services into discrete elements that can be combined to create custom services, he says. For example, a technician could pull together authentication, encryption and authorization elements to support a virtual private network service. These types of elements can also be mixed and matched in various ways to fashion custom services, Alles says. Shasta's gear will also track key billing data so carriers can charge based on usage.