Front Page: The Products of SUPERCOMM 2003

Vendors Emphasize Local Broadband, Ethernet, Carrier Support

As the largest domestic telecommunications trade show, SUPERCOMM tends to bring out nearly everything in the way of exhibitor news. But among the overarching themes this year are how most efficiently to enable local broadband connections; how service providers can use existing infrastructure as they add new services; and how equipment vendors can better support carriers in their quest to drive new revenue.

On the broadband access front, Catena Networks Inc. plans to unveil its CN1000FX, a multiservice box supporting fiber-to-the-home, -premises or -curb deployments. The company's other products to date have been copper-based solutions.

The CN1000FX was designed for newly built, greenfield neighborhoods, broadband overbuild applications and remote, low-density rural locations.

It supports lifeline POTS, ADSL, narrowband special services, G.SHDSL, and very-high-data-rate DSL. Because the CN1000FX has POTS and ADSL capability on every line, carriers can deploy it in a POTS-only configuration and then add broadband as service orders are received.

Gary Bolton, vice president of product marketing, says Catena is in commercial deployments with two of the three RBOCs and expects to add a third RBOC to its customer lineup by SUPERCOMM time. Bolton says the company's nondisclosure agreements with the telcos bar him from revealing further details.

Adtran Inc. also expects to announce a deal with a major U.S. service provider at the show, in this vendor's case, for its Total Access 3000 DSLAM. Additionally, Adtran at the show will unveil recently added OC3c mux and STM1 functionality of the box, which initially supported DS3 and ATM IMA exclusively. The ability to scale the DSLAM to more than one chassis through subtending ATM multiplexer functionality is another new addition to the product and will be generally available in the July/August time frame, says Jay Wilson, director of product management for the carrier networks division at Adtran. Finally, the company is using the show to talk more about the IMA aggregation application for its Total Access 3000 DSLAM and to highlight its G.SHDSL products, which it can deliver as an end-to-end solution.

In other exhibitor news, Occam Networks will do the first public demonstration of its new Broadband Loop Carrier 6000 Platform. The Ethernet and IP-based loop carrier system -- which combines the functionality of a DLC, DSLAM, optical transport device, Ethernet switch and VoIP gateway in a single box -- scales from 24 users to thousands of users. It enables carriers to deliver everything from narrowband to gigabit services to each customer.

"Our original 1200 [product] was a pizza box form factor. [The BLC] 6000 lets us go to much great densities" has all the same functionality and sits at the edge of the network, says Russ Sharer, vice president of marketing. "What makes it different is it's the first loop carrier built around gigE." It scales up to gigabit Ethernet rates, making the BLC 6000 attractive for video deployments, he says. The BLC 6000 is scheduled to ship early in third quarter, he adds.

Among the companies showing wares that can help service providers utilize existing infrastructure to add new services will be ANDA Networks. At the Atlanta show, ANDA will introduce EtherTone, a new family of customer premises and central office solutions that enable carriers to offer next-generation, Ethernet-based services over existing SONET infrastructure. ANDA's new product family includes single user and multitenant customer-site access devices, central office aggregation equipment, and the EtherView management platform.

ANDA's EtherEdge 4000 is the first EtherTone product, providing EtherTone to multitenant units with the ability to terminate up to 24 subscriber lines. From a physical layer perspective, the EtherEdge 4000 provides a 100BaseT interface to a subscriber via a G.SHDSL, DS1 or DS3 facility. At the service layer, end users can use virtual LANs and QoS to ensure security and priority for applications, and carriers can manage services to ensure compliance with service level agreements.

Larscom Inc. will show its Orion 7400, which extends the SONET infrastructure to the customer location, allowing the delivery of fast Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet and TDM services at what the company says is a fraction of the cost of traditional add/drop multiplexers. The list price of the Orion 7400 starts at $5,000. Assuming that the service provider charges subscribers between $500 and $1,500 per megabit of Ethernet or TDM bandwidth per month, the service provider can generate an average of $144,000 in annual revenue for an initial equipment cost of $5,000, says Larscom.

Fujitsu Network Communications Inc., meanwhile, plans to show its Ethernet capabilities on a number of different platforms, says Parker Blackwell, vice president of metro product marketing. The company says Ethernet over SONET makes a lot of sense and likely is the most profitable way for large incumbent service providers to deliver Ethernet transport. That's because SONET has a large installed base of equipment and is ubiquitous in most incumbent networks. In addition to its Ethernet transport tools, Blackwell told xchange in late April that Fujitsu also has been exploring whether to introduce the Ethernet access products it offers in Asia to the American market.

Of course, Ethernet will a focus for many vendors at SUPERCOMM (for more on Ethernet services and technology see our cover story this month, page 10, and xchange's May story on other SUPERCOMM Ethernet news, page 14). At least 25 companies will be involved in what the Metro Ethernet Forum's Mark Fishburn says is the first interoperability demonstration of Ethernet LAN services and Ethernet line services. Fishburn, MEF's co-chairman of marketing and vice president of technology strategy for Spirent Communications, says Ethernet line services are point-to-point connections provided by service providers to make the network look like a single connection. The Ethernet LAN demonstration will show how virtual LAN service can exist across a variety of technologies, with Ethernet as the primary endpoint. Applications in the demo will include voice over IP, point-to-point video links, live video feeds and various data applications. Quality of service via MPLS and RPR also will be part of the demonstration.

In one of the other major SUPERCOMM show demonstrations, member companies of The MPLS/Frame Relay Alliance will conduct the first live demonstration of frame relay and ATM over MPLS and Virtual Private LAN Services. Alliance members will demonstrate multivendor interoperability of Fast Re-Route, Layer 2 point-to-point Ethernet services, and Layer 3 RFC 2547-bis VPN operation.

On an entirely separate front, General Bandwidth this month makes available its NGN software for the company's G6 platform, an access and media gateway that enables service providers to deliver voice over broadband networks, develop new services, reduce costs, and migrate to a new voice infrastructure. With the new NGN software, G6 includes softswitch and PacketCable support; hosted IP Centrex/feature server support (so it can -- on a line-by-line basis -- tie in with equipment from such companies as Broadsoft and VocalData Inc. to enable enhanced voice services); support for MGCP, TGCP and SIP protocols; PRI termination; and G.729e.

Meanwhile, VocalData will talk about how it supports carriers in their quest to drive new revenue and offer sticky services. At SUPERCOMM, the company will showcase its recently announced Business Success Portfolio, which includes marketing services, a sales toolkit and carrier deployment services to support customers using its technology to offer enhanced services.

The marketing services portion was designed to help customers develop go-to-market strategies and can include market segmentation, marketing/messaging, input on bundle structure and pricing decisions, development or critiquing of sales efforts, strategic planning, market analysis and co-marketing around services based on VocalData technology. Through the sales toolkit, VocalData offers content, sales guides, customer demonstrations and presentations, templates or background customers can use for their sales strategies, white papers and several business cases for service providers and enterprise customers. Carrier deployment services include professional services related to customer infrastructure, provisioning, billing, customer care and other support systems.

Mark Whittier, senior vice president, says VocalData always has offered many of these services and all the company's customers get some marketing support -- such as market data, results of various business models, comparative information on pricing and bundling from other service providers on what's been successful, basic messaging and business propositions. However, with VocalData's new Business Success Portfolio, the company has packaged options for purchasing additional, customized professional services from the company.

In other recent news, VocalData has added new features to its VOISS hosted IP telephony application suite, including additional security measures and more robust find me-follow me services and the company has organized around four applications. "Being a relatively young company in a relatively young marketplace, we've [spent a lot of time in the past] responding to immediate customer needs," Whittier says. "Now, with more maturity, we're looking at where the marketplace is going and where VoIP can shine and our future product roadmap. So we have organized formally and committed to four application areas and are addressing those applications' requirements in the long term." Those applications include productivity, mobility, business applications and desktop integration. Productivity includes voicemail, conferencing and unified messaging/instant messaging, all of which the company offers today. The company is building into its product roadmap things like fuller integration of IM and presence, fax and e-mail integration, text-to-speech conversion, additional support for media players for customers with high-bandwidth media requirements or video requirements, and integration with additional desktop applications. In the mobility category, VocalData already offers a single interface for all wireless and wireline voice and data devices, allowing customers to manage their messages via a special Web portal. Future enhancements include softphone integration and more wireless interoperability, for things like 802.11b. Business applications, as VocalData defines them, include call center features like queuing, routing, hunt groups and call pick up; and voice VPN, which supports teleworking. VocalData intends to add features in this category including next-generation call center features such as the ability to add remote agents, skills-based routing and IVR, as well as expending IM and e-mail requests into a call center environment. Desktop integration, meanwhile, refers to the ability to drive all applications and functionality within all of the above from Web pages so the customer can more easily configure and use all those features. In addition to what VocalData already offers on this front, the company plans to offer more customization. That could, for example, include creating special interfaces for various vertical industries or residential users.

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines