Huge pipes are not enough
The fastest switches powering the biggest pipes won't necessarily win the game. If size and speed is the only differentiator, everyone will fight to be the discount king, and wavelength will become a commodity in a long price war.
Carriers are looking to vendors that can combine hardware switches with intelligent software so they can offer different classes of Internet services to their customers.
"If you really want to offer carrier-class services over a data network, you need a way to guarantee the performance of the packets," Light Reading's Clavenna says. "The only way is with new forms of switches and routers, and equipment at the edge" of the network.
Celox Networks in January came out with a switch that can serve 6 million subscribers at a time and deliver 16 levels of service, from firewall protection to voice-over-IP to bandwidth on demand. It allows service providers to offer the basic $29.95-per-month service, but then easily ramp up to about $60 per customer with the lure of the gold-plated options.
The services-creation field is crowded with new products from CoSine Communications, Lucent's Spring Tide Networks, Nortel's Shasta line, Quarry Technologies and Redback Networks, among others. They're all stuck in second gear, waiting for a killer application to come along so carriers can fill their bandwidth and start clamoring for faster switches that can deliver even more traffic.
Equipment vendors would do well to remind themselves how pragmatic and bottom-line oriented their carrier customers are - especially now that financing is tight.
Global NAPs, an eastern seaboard carrier, is buying voice packet switches from Convergent Networks because it needs to make money now, and can do so with equipment geared to ATM protocols. Frank Gangi, president of Global NAPs, is convinced that ATM has a lot more life left in it - and some advantages over IP. "IP doesn't have quality of service inherent in its protocol, but ATM was written from the outset with QOS in mind," Gangi says.
The fact that IP works best with the cheap-to-install, popular and newly speedy Ethernet technology doesn't daunt Gangi. "For every argument I can make about how great ATM is, they can make an equally passionate argument about IP," he says. "But quality of service is just not there with IP. We couldn't migrate to any solution, no matter how cheap or fast or sexy, if your phone call is going to sound any different than it sounds on the traditional circuit network. If you've ever used IP telephony, it drops and garbles too much."
With equipment from Convergent, Marconi and Sycamore, Global NAPs' network "isn't a spider-web mass of 50 lines in 50 places," Gangi says. "It's one big, fat pipe into an ATM cloud. It's much more efficient and you get real savings. Plus, it's about a tenth the cost of traditional stuff. And it offers new services that Class 4 switches didn't dream of."
ONI Systems' Hugh Martin doesn't agree about ATM's future, but that's what makes horse races. He's betting on IP "for one simple reason: Never bet against Ethernet," he says.
Ethernet, a protocol most commonly used with IP, is cheap and simple to install. The rap has been that it's slow. But with optical fiber, Ethernet has moved up from 10-megabit-per-second speeds to 100-Mbps to gigabit-per-second speeds. "And we're less than nine months away from 10-gig [Gbps] Ethernet," Martin says. "It's just relentless. It's a technology that never loses. And Ethernet is IP. Over time, ATM is going to go away."
The dozen companies making intelligent devices for what they believe will be an IP future are trying to put a lie to the claim that IP and Ethernet don't allow service providers to offer different classes of service.
