Sailing Into SUPERCOMM

“Convergence is the theme of the show,” says Chris Nicoll, director of strategic marketing at Lucent Technologies Inc. “That’s the message we’ve been on for CTIA, CeBIT, VON. Where we’re seeing the marketplace going in talking to wireline and wireless carriers is the idea not of network convergence, but of service convergence.” That will entail making services simple to use, secure, portable and personalized, says Nicoll, adding that Lucent will enable all of that. “The focus of all that is increasing ARPU and making services stickier,” he says.

IMS

Many in the industry now believe a key enabling technology behind the convergence of wireline and wireless services will be IMS, or IP Multimedia Subsystem. IMS is a standard architecture designed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for mobile networks, for the convergence of voice, data and multimedia applications onto one IP-based core. It separates the application layer from call control, signaling and gateway functionality. “We think [IMS] will be quite hot” at SUPERCOMM 2005, says Jim Dondero, vice president of marketing for carrier packet networks at Nortel Networks Ltd. IMA “started in the wireless world, but now has captured the attention of wireline carriers as well.”

While the IMS concept is a few years old, Dondero says he expects to see new activity from vendors next month at SUPERCOMM to position their portfolios around IMS. He mentions that in February Nortel announced a relationship with IBM Corp. to do client and BSS/OSS integration related to IMS. Watch for more such alliance activity around IMS, which requires the combination of telecom and IT, says Dondero.

IMS also will be a major theme at the show for Intel Corp. “The trend toward IP-based multimedia services on IMS platforms is increasing the need for a flexible and agile network infrastructure,” says Sandra Rivera, director of marketing for the modular communications platform division at Intel Corp. “To meet the rigorous performance demands placed on IMS platforms, and the reuse and extensibility customers required in their platform architecture, AdvancedTCA-based solutions are an ideal choice for deployment of converged voice, video and data services.”

Another key part of the wireless/wireline discussion, notes BellSouth Corp. CTO Bill Smith, is handsets. Wi-Fi/GSM handsets are hitting the market, he notes, adding that multimode handsets could allow service providers to integrate voice services between home Wi-Fi networks attached to the wireline network and wide area mobile networks. “It’s possible BellSouth could make some contract announcements” in this space at SUPERCOMM, Smith adds.

Westell Technologies Inc. will be among the vendors “at least talking about our plans for mobile-to-wired integration,” says Director of Product Management Scott Voegele. The company’s VoIP integration gateway, which includes the functionality of a DSL modem and LAN/wireless router, potentially could act as a gateway between the home and the wide area for a Wi-Fi-enabled cell phone, he says. “That’s something our carrier customers have shown great interest in,” says Voegele of Westell, a CPE provider with a good embedded base at the RBOCs.

He adds the company is bringing standard cordless phone technology to its gateway as a low-cost, interim way to connect phones to the gateway without using Wi-Fi phones. “We’re exploring new smart antennas, where the gateway will detect if there’s a device in the house trying to attach to it,” adds Voegele, noting that Westell’s booth will include a home networking section, part of which will be about wireless. “For areas in the home where you’re not getting good Wi-Fi coverage, we’re pursuing new technologies to allow us to make sure WLAN has good coverage throughout the house.”

FTTx & IPTV

Of course, another aspect of convergence is the move by cablecos into the phone business and the push by telcos into consumer video services.

Given the moves by BellSouth, SBC Communications Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. into residential fiber access and video — and, of course, the efforts by various other carriers such as independent telcos in the triple play realm — fiber access and IPTV certainly will receive a healthy amount of attention at SUPERCOMM 2005 as well.

Alcatel, which SBC has named as its primary network infrastructure equipment provider for Project Lightspeed, will have an area in its booth addressing IPTV, including the Alcatel/Microsoft Corp. IPTV relationship and what it means to the user experience, says Allison Cerra, Alcatel’s director of consumer marketing. Alcatel’s vision of the future is that the user will remain at the center of his or her experience, which will include anywhere access to any type of communications, she says. (The other side of Alcatel’s booth will focus on managed communications services for enterprise users.) “We think the triple play will be the focus at the show,” says Dave Boland, senior product marketing manager at Juniper Networks Inc.

“People have been talking about triple play, but it’s been a lot of field trials and technical trials. Now people are seeing some real live deployments of production networks.”

Juniper at the show expects to make a handful of product announcements, says Boland, adding that the company is moving to push its equipment closer to end users with the triple play in mind. He mentions there is a need to increase bandwidth to users and enable intelligent communications between B-RAS equipment and remote gateways at customer homes. As a result, the industry will see a lot of “2Wire-type boxes,” he says, referring to the set-top box/home gateway devices 2Wire Inc. is building for SBC that will pull live video services from EchoStar Communications Corp.’s DISH Network as well as on-demand video, music and Internet content via DSL. Boland also mentions router vendors like Juniper will come out with new intelligent features like multicast, IGMP for channel changing and better packet performance to carry more traffic.

Of course, the massive effort to put together the triple or quadruple play will be meaningless if the telco in question can’t attract, keep and create higher average revenue per user from its customers as a result.

That’s why Pannaway Technologies Inc. — which already has been proactive in helping its independent telco customers market and brand their service packages — at SUPERCOMM will talk about how it easily can allow its carrier customers to add Wi-Fi to their bundles.

Pannaway at the show plans to unveil a new partnership with Single Digits Inc., which provides wireless hotspot management software and hosting solutions. This relationship enables Pannaway to offer its carrier customers the ability to use their existing back-end subscriber management tool from the vendor to provision hotspot service as yet another offer for their customers, explains Kevin Brown, Pannaway’s vice president of marketing. “Service providers are having a hard time marketing and getting customers, so service providers can use hotspot [access as one more way] to market to new customers and let them know what other services they have to offer.”

Ethernet

In addition to IMS, wireless/wireline integration and video, Ethernet will have a very strong presence at SUPERCOMM on a number of fronts.

“The definite trend, where operators want to move beyond basic best-effort Internet service to a full triple play offering, is toward Ethernet aggregation,” says Jay Fausch, senior director of marketing for Alcatel’s fixed communications group. “Our 7302 ISAM as well as the 7330 FTTN play a role in this as access nodes, while the 7450 ESS and 7750 SR can play a role in the broadband service delivery network. In conjunction with this trend, we’re seeing increasing interest in DHCP (as opposed to PPP) for subscriber management. This means the centralized B-RAS in the network is giving way to more distributed subscriber management functions in the service delivery and aggregation network.”

Indeed. Laurel Networks Inc. this month was expected to announce a new “drop-in” IP video routing solution designed to meet the needs of DSL access providers who want to build converged IP networks. Based on Laurel’s ST200 broadband services router, the offering includes new hardware and software designed to deliver IPTV and video-on-demand services. The new solution, which Laurel will highlight at SUPERCOMM, will allow service providers to decrease capital and operational expenses while increasing per subscriber income through the delivery of video over Ethernet-based access networks.

Steve Vogelsang, Laurel’s vice president of marketing, explains that the ST200 is fully compatible with the existing ATM access network, so a service provider that wants to offer video immediately but not upgrade its access network can do so. However, he adds, the trend is to push fiber and/or DSLAMs closer to users. In that scenario, he explains, the ST200 can do all aggregation and routing behind DSLAMs in remote terminals and come into the central office via gigE. “Then the ST200 can also move to the edge,” he says.

Laurel’s new “drop-in” IP video routing solution includes “Ethernetoptimized” cards for the ST200 that increase density up to 10 wire-speed gigE ports per slot, and at a third the price per port of other IP routers, he says. The solution has wire-speed multicast performance; guaranteed QoS so carriers can prioritize video; and security capabilities specific to IP video, such as blocking unauthorized access, Vogelsang says. The solution also includes new software geared to IP video to do things like discover, provision, authenticate and configure home media devices, he says, adding both the new software and router cards are slated for general availability in the third quarter.

Ethernet and pushing more functionality closer to the customer also will be key themes for Verilink Corp. at SUPERCOMM, says Sab Gosal, vice president of marketing at the company. Gosal tells xchange it will announce a packet DSLAM and a couple of routing products, one in the wireless space, as well as a new-generation solutions architecture. “What we’re doing is expanding our integrated access product line, for affordability to deliver voice and data,” Gosal says.

The packet DSLAM is designed to push bandwidth aggregation and grooming closer to the customer premises. By moving those functions closer to the customer, carriers can offset heavy investments in points of presence or central offices where there is large, expensive gear, Gosal explains, adding that can result in savings of up to 40 percent versus conventional architectures.

“Ethernet lets you drive costs out of the infrastructure,” on a variety of fronts, continues Gosal, citing Ethernet in the First Mile as yet another example of this. Gosal expects several companies to get into the Ethernet-over-copper space with new products next month.

“Ethernet lends itself to VoIP too, so our news brings the two worlds together,” says Gosal, noting that Verilink expects to announce new VoIP products at the show. “It will mainly be about hosted applications and the kinds of value-added applications that can be delivered.” Verilink will conduct a full seminar in its booth about how EFM and VoIP lend themselves to one another.

The consumer triple play and using it to deliver IPTV and other services also likely will be the focus for Tellabs Inc. at SUPERCOMM, says Stu Benington, the company’s director of global portfolio marketing. What’s new this year, he says, is an emphasis on service assurance for Ethernet and the technologies used to deliver these services. Tellabs has products like its 8800 series of intelligent multiservice routers with Ethernet capabilities, he says, but the emphasis in the industry is to look beyond the box and tie together higher layer services with physical layer services. “The idea is that the sum is greater than the parts,” he says, adding that “carrier-grade Ethernet has not yet been deployed.”

Umesh Kukreja, director of product marketing with Atrica Inc., continues that the big buzz at SUPERCOMM will be “a lot more specific categorization of carrier Ethernet.”

The comments of Benington and Kukreja tap into an issue the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) now is addressing. Last month, the MEF defined what it means to deliver carrier-class Ethernet by defining the five attributes required, and announced plans for an independent lab to do certification based on that definition.

The five new carrier-class attributes are scalability (related to both services and bandwidth), protection (5msec), hard QoS (through end-toend SLAs), TDM support (to do circuit emulation) and service management.

The first phase of the Certification Program, based initially at Iometrix Inc.’s test laboratories, will allow MEF member companies to obtain international certification that their products meet the Carrier Ethernet service standards detailed in the MEF specifications, widely acknowledged as the primary definition for Metro Ethernet services.

The first phase was slated to begin in April 2005 with the test laboratory launch by Iometrix. The intention is to complete the first phase of the program toward the end of the third quarter this year, when further test laboratories will be accepted by the MEF Certification Committee and the program will be opened up to non-members of the MEF.

Folks interested in Carrier Ethernet and certification will be able to visit the MEF booth at SUPERCOMM where they will be able to view the first public demonstration of these five standardized attributes. Twenty-five to 30 companies will take part in the interoperability demo, which is the largest the MEF has ever staged.

Tying in with the idea of more reliable and controllable Ethernet services, Covaro Networks Inc. at SUPERCOMM plans to launch the CC-811, which is a gigabit Ethernet demarcation product that sits at the edge of carrier networks to enable carriers to check SLAs at the carrier hand-off. According to Fred Ellefson, Covaro’s vice president of marketing, it allows service providers to manage Ethernet services by doing remote loopbacks and testing to the demarc point. Also new from Covaro at SUPERCOMM will be an Ethernet over T1 product.

Pseudo Wire

Another technology tying into the general themes of convergence and integration is pseudo wire, which Steve Byars, vice president of marketing at Axerra Networks Inc., says will be prevalent at SUPERCOMM.

“It’s got huge traction right now,” Byars says of pseudo wire, which came out of an IETF working group called Pseudo Wire Emulation Edge to Edge, or pwe3 (said “pee wee three”).

“It’s about being able to carry any kind of service over a packet network,” he says. “We’re convinced this is really the future of multiservice.” Axerra has pseudo wire products shipping and deployed with customers. But what’s really new about pseudo wire is the traction it’s getting with three different types of service providers — mobile wireless carriers, the cable MSOs and the carrier Ethernet providers, he says, adding Cox Communications Inc. has been at the forefront of commercial service deployments of the technology, using pseudo wire to enable a range of small and medium business services off its coaxial cable network.

With a pseudo wire access device at the customer premises, a carrier can offer full TDM services as well as a range of business-class data services including frame relay and Ethernet private LAN services, he says. “Pseudo wire boxes are flexible products that enable a whole range of services,” he says.

Chip Redden, vice president of marketing and product management at Overture Networks, says pseudo wire addresses how carriers with packet-based networks can carry traditional voice traffic by emulating a TDM infrastructure so voice traffic “thinks it’s on a TDM network.” Redden adds that pseudo wire “is rapidly becoming a major initiative, because with all the talk about packet and Ethernet, TDM doesn’t go away.”

As for Overture’s news at SUPERCOMM, the company expects to come out with the ISG 140 (4 T1/E1s) and ISG 180 (8 T1s/E1s), devices which use multilink point-to-point protocol to bond up to eight circuits of T1/E1 for 12 or 16 megs to reach “off-net” customers. “If you offer Ethernet services to customers who are on-net, you have the ability to offer any service at any rate with Ethernet,” he says. “For those not on your network, how do you offer the same kind of service?” The Overture solution lets carriers manage customer-located equipment, run loopbacks on those devices and on the Ethernet circuits as well.

what happened to wimax

IN THE WORLD OF HIGH-TECH, PRODUCTS ARE not always delivered precisely when expected. Such is the case with WiMAX.

Last year at SUPERCOMM a good number of vendors pledged their allegiance to the new broadband wireless standard, indicating that actual WiMAX products were likely to be available by SUPERCOMM this year. But while WiMAX as a point of discussion certainly will be in circulation at next month’s show in Chicago, the introduction of actual WiMAX-compliant equipment will not. That’s because, as reported previously in xchange (March, page 18), the WiMAX Forum’s Certified program won’t even launch until July 2005, a month after SUPERCOMM 2005. And products first must be certified before gaining the official title of WiMAX.

But so heavy is the hype related to WiMAX that several vendors over the past year or so have labeled their products “WiMAX ready,” and Airspan Networks Inc. discarded the term “WiMAX ready” altogether in its March 9 announcement of the AS.MAX family of WiMAX self-installable base stations and end-user devices.

“Airspan now has thrown down the gauntlet, now everybody — Redline [Communications], Aperto [Networks Inc.] — will come out with some announcement about self-install WiMAX,” says an executive at one broadband wireless equipment vendor. “Even Navini [Networks Inc.], which did self-install on proprietary equipment, may announce self-install WiMAX. Self-install WiMAX means the antenna is in the kit when you send it to the customer, so the customer can, through the mail or retail [store, get the equipment], and plug it into the wall, and it works.”

Carlton O’Neal, vice president of marketing at Alvarion Inc., says that, like Airspan, Alvarion already has incorporated the Intel chip into WiMAX CPE and has been testing product for about a year. He explains that Alvarion will release news of its WiMAX products even before SUPERCOMM 2005, as the Intel chip will be commercial in the second quarter, “how can anybody announce [they have a WiMAX system based on the Intel chip] until the chip is commercial?” he asks.

Of course, the Airspan announcement upped the ante for competitors, so companies like Alvarion need to express to the market that they’re as up-to-speed with WiMAX as Airspan.

Intel Corp. was expected to announce last month the commercialization of “Rosedale,” its WiMAX chip. That, the opening of the WiMAX certification lab in July and the fact that Airspan, Alvarion and Redline — all three of which are Intel chip partners — in March came together to start private interoperability testing of their IEEE 802.16-2004 systems, is keeping things moving with WiMAX, even though actual WiMAX equipment won’t be ready in time for SUPERCOMM.

Research and analysis firm Maravedis Inc. in its report “WiMAX and Broadband Wireless (Sub-11Ghz) Worldwide Market Analysis and Trends 2005-2010,” says:

• The broadband wireless market (sub-11Ghz) has grown from $430 million in 2003 to $562 million in 2004, a 30 percent increase.
• That market is projected to exceed $2 billion by the end of 2009.
• “The top two pre-requisites for WiMAX success according to service providers surveyed is CPE below $300 and higher throughput” says Adlane Fellah, senior analyst and founder of Maravedis. “Service providers and end users will benefit from the adoption of WiMAX systems, which will help reduce equipment and component costs through integration and economies of scale. We expect the cost reduction impact to be mostly on the CPE and foresee data only CPE at less than $100 by 2010.”

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