UNDER THE INFLUENCE

VoIP: THE TALK OF THE TOWN

by Kevin Fitchard

Though perhaps not the topic of every keynote or panel discussion, voice-over-IP technology generated enough excitement on the show floor and prompted enough related announcements to make it the buzzword of the event.

Perhaps the most significant announcement came from Qwest. The carrier announced it would launch business-managed VoIP services nationwide by the end of the year, using Sylantro and Sonus gear as well as its new network of Lucent gateways to provide Centrex IP and managed PBX services to enterprise and business customers in 26 markets coast to coast. While the other RBOCs have VoIP services deployed over their networks to limited degrees — BellSouth's IP services stop at the network edge, and SBC and Verizon's IP VPN services support voice — Qwest is hoping to make its mark as the first RBOC to cross over the line to fully managed end-to-end VoIP service. The only other North American incumbent to do that so far is Bell Canada.

And unlike some of the other incumbents, Qwest isn't discounting VoIP on the consumer side. With the exception of Verizon, which is trialing its own consumer VoIP offering, incumbent telcos have seen little value in residential VoIP as it cannibalizes their core business without providing any definite additional revenue streams in the future. Qwest, however, has been running its own market trials in Minnesota this year and even unbundled DSL from its public network voice service, setting the stage for a residential launch.

“This is an emerging technology, and our customers are very interested in it,” said Balan Nair, chief technology officer for Qwest. “But our consumer service will be a mass-market offering. We have a lot of things to fine tune internally before we're completely ready. We want to have a seamless deployment.”

Meanwhile, the quarter officially ended on June 31, and Verizon had not yet launched its promised residential and small business VoIP service. While packet to the home never materialized, packet to the central office did. Verizon announced it would take its Class 4 packet-switching efforts to the Class 5 switch, decommissioning five Nortel circuit switches in California and replacing them with two of that vendor's Succession softswitches. Verizon warned it wasn't preparing a packet-switching revolution that would make it the first RBOC to go fully IP. CTO Barry Paulson said Verizon had enjoyed moderate success with its Class 4 and tandem replacement project, off-loading almost all of its long-distance traffic and a portion of its intra-city switching onto the Nortel platform. Verizon now wants to see if it can emulate the intelligence of its Class 5 network over the same infrastructure, Paulson said.

“Our first goal is to simply replicate the services we currently offer on our Class 5 infrastructure over the new switches,” Paulson said. “We wanted to get some first hand experience with the technology and we felt that these would be the perfect markets to do them in. They are growing rapidly and have a good mix of residential and business customers.”

While Verizon and the other RBOCs may be waiting on offering VoIP to their customers, Covad is not. At Supercomm, it announced a fully managed VoIP service geared at small and medium customers that it plans on not only selling through direct sales channels but also packaging with its wholesale SDSL and T-1 lines. As the calendar flipped from June to July, Covad brought the service to 13 major markets in the U.S. with plans to launch in all 100 of its MSAs by the end of the year. VoIP essentially became instantly accessible to any major carrier in the country, but Covad said it plans to focus more on its own direct sales, using VoIP to mark its emergence as a full-service carrier, said Ed Mattix, senior vice president of communications and brand at Covad.

“We'll sell wholesale VoIP end-to-end, and we'll continue to offer our voice optimized loop to other carriers, but we believe we have a viable option for small businesses now where they can come directly to Covad,” Mattix said.

FTTN: ONE GIANT STEP FOR VIDEO

by Vince Vittore

The biggest access news coming out of Supercomm 2004 wasn't from an access vendor. In fact, the one announcement that overshadowed much of the proceedings otherwise filled with typical product introductions was more of a promise with lots of strings attached than an actual declaration.

On the Tuesday morning of the show, SBC Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre stood before an audience of a few thousand people and declared the company had once again decided to get into the video market. But unlike previous attempts that mimicked the traditional hybrid fiber/coax architecture of cable or that used a satellite provider for the video portion of its triple-play services, the RBOC's newest plan calls for it to spend between $4 billion and $6 billion on a fiber-to-the-neighborhood (FTTN) project that will bring IP-based video to consumers. Additionally, the company said it signed an agreement with Microsoft to test the vendor's IP TV platform over its FTTN network.

“This is really exciting stuff,” Whitacre said. “IP TV gives customers a richer, more self-controlled and more interactive television experience in ways that today's providers cannot. It has to ride over a fiber-rich network. And it will set the stage for full competition against the cable.”

Though few expect SBC to begin mass deployment of FTTN networks or delve into the IP TV market in a significant way anytime soon, the announcement carries with it some major implications for the access sector in general, and the telco TV market specifically. SBC's decision, combined with hints from both Verizon and BellSouth that they are about to do the same, will require access vendors that have been targeting the smaller independent telco market to prove their platforms can scale to meet the demands of the largest local carriers in the U.S. It also will require that the carriers solve some of the more complex questions facing those telcos that have either gingerly stepped into video or are contemplating large deployments. Supercomm in fact became a de facto forum in which vendors often made their product pitches as part of larger arguments for various parts of the answers.

If there is a single question that must first be answered, it's the issue of what services the RBOCs plan to deploy as part of their budding video services. Stripped down to its most basic elements, video service can be nothing more than a library of pay-per-view movies on a server in the network that can be downloaded to an IP set-top box. At the other end of the spectrum is the 300-plus-channel universe, with video-on-demand, high-definition TV, interactive services and even big upstream paths that will allow subscribers to create and share their video content.

And while most RBOCs, and even some of the larger IOCs, won't get into specifics just yet, vendors at Supercomm had plenty of opinions.

“I'm a believer that if you don't come out with high-definition in your roadmap, you've got a non-starter,” said Kevin Schneider, chief technology officer for Adtran, which used the show to introduce new multicast capabilities in its DSLAMs.

Others believe the size of RBOCs' installed access line base will require that they ease into the video market with services that look similar to traditional cable operators' lineups. Taking a cue from European and Asian telcos that have made the move to video, Aviv Ronai, assistant vice president of marketing for ECI Telecom, said much will be based on the particular competitive situation in each market.

“They're not looking at day one full-blown video services,” he said. “In Europe, we're seeing VOD service is becoming the bare minimum for launching video. The telco operator of Cyprus, for example, is launching video over DSL and they have about 30 broadcast channels.”

Still, others believe that the nature of telco plant with its ability to offer multicast and unicast services will allow carriers to completely change the way consumers view the TV experience.

“Instead of having the channel mode that we're used to, you're going to have the portal mode,” said David Howard, product line manager for UTStarcom, which teamed up with chip vendor Ikanos to demonstrate HDTV over a 1000-foot copper loop at the show. “Having things on demand will be key. The channels are going to go away. It's going to be a whole new model.”

Interlaced with the model debate is the number of video streams required, the amount of bandwidth that will be required and the number of video streams that will be delivered. In his Supercomm keynote, Whitacre said SBC is looking to deliver between 15 Mb/s and 20 Mb/s over its FTTN system. In Verizon's latest fiber to the home deployment in Keller, Texas, the company is offering three tiers between 5 Mb/s and 30 Mb/s though none of the packages include video yet. Indeed, the answer to both questions depends largely on the location of the carrier, according to vendors at Supercomm.

In the U.S., the typical request for proposal from larger carriers is specifying that ability to deliver three video streams, said Ehud Hai, director of product marketing for ECI. With each digital video stream taking a couple of megabytes of bandwidth, that would translate into at least 10 Mb/s per home.

“We see numbers between 15 Mb/s and 26 Mb/s to begin with,” Hai said. “In places such as Europe, we also see numbers from 4 Mb/s up to 10 to 12 Mb/s.”

In Asia, the bandwidth requirements are very high, but the number of actual video streams being delivered is likely to be no more than two. The assumption is that many users are viewing the PC as an alternative to the TV for viewing video.

“Over the last few months, there's been a need to go to higher bandwidth,” said Piyush Sevalia, director of product marketing for Ikanos. “With 100 Mb/s it basically says, there is a lot of headroom there [for additional streams].”

Getting past those basic questions will lead to other issues, but addressing the basic elements is something that must be tackled first. If they can figure out those basic elements, many believe telcos will have some advantages in the video market.

“If you assume that the cable infrastructure isn't going to change, there are opportunities,” said Ed Graczyk, director of marketing for Microsoft TV. “You've got set-top boxes that have less capacity than some digital watches.”

OSS: LESSONS FROM 1893

by Tim McElligott

Watching vendors that have survived the long telecom drought as well as the hopeful new start-ups burst from the starting line of the telecom recovery, the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1893 comes to mind.

Last month at Supercomm 2004, companies from every sector ran themselves ragged driving their strategic stakes in the ground. Test equipment companies ran to the fertile ground of IP, Ethernet and convergence. OSS companies flocked to cable. The new session control providers raced to the meadow's edge to plant their flags.

Some of these squatters may be content to farm the fields they have staked out, but like any land grab, the real winners are the ones who guess correctly where the railroad is going to pass through or who have the best access to the river.

“It's clear to us which technologies will win,” said John Peeler, president and CEO of Acterna. “It's the timing that's hard to pick.”

Ah, the Dust Bowl. Land grabbers couldn't have predicted that any better than telecom companies could have predicted the bursting of their bubble or where the capex dollars will flow from next. So for now, leading test companies such as Acterna, Agilent Technologies, Spirent Communications and Tektronix have staked their claims on being comprehensive. Tektronix chose to wait until after Supercomm to announce its acquisition of Inet Technologies, but the equipment and network test combination rivals the strategies of its competitors released the week before.

For about $325 million, Tektronix CEO Rick Wills has taken his company out of the labs and into the operators' networks. “Together we will become the most complete provider of network and protocol analysis solutions,” Wills said.

Not if his competitors have anything to say about it — and they do. Comprehensive was the look Agilent and Spirent were shooting for by announcing broad test portfolios and test systems.

Spirent launched its SmartSight Diagnostic Portfolio for the IP market, which includes technology and professional services solutions for voice over IP, IP VPNs, video over IP and Ethernet.

The portfolio consists of the SmartSight Operational Support System (OSS), Quality of Service Scope, Network Interface Device and the Broadband Remote Test Unit, which was previously introduced. Together, the solutions are designed to provide better diagnostics and visibility into IP and Ethernet services from both an operational and customer premises level.

“Consumers of services within the enterprise are very sophisticated. Their IT departments often know more than the service provider,” said David Gellerman, vice president of technology and business development at Spirent. “So you really have to be able to see what is happening [all the way to the demarc].”

Spirent also added VoIP performance testing capabilities to its Abacus 5000 IP Telephony Test System, which can emulate a VoIP-to-public network call, and added a new performance and quality-of-service testing platform called the mAX SLAM that supports DSLAMs that provide triple-play services.

Answering Spirent's portfolio pitch, Agilent introduced the N2X, a comprehensive multiservices test solution for converging voice and data networks. The N2X does testing for Ethernet, IP VPN and L2oMPLS for ATM. It includes a 40 Gb/s packet-over-Sonet interface card, a tri-rate 10/100/1000 Ethernet test card and a 10 Gb/s Ethernet test card.

Agilent also made several other product introductions and enhancements, including an IP security version 6 test solution for VPN concentrators and firewalls, the Agilent OSS MPLS QoS Manager for Cisco MPLS VPN networks, and additional functionality to its OnmiBER OTN such as Generic Framing Procedure, virtual concatenation, Ethernet payload and Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme.

“We're clearly focused on the one-vendor concept for our customers,” said Ananda Sen Gupta, strategic marketing manager in Agilent's OSS division.

Acterna broadened its portfolio with what seems to be a trend in the test market: training and education. The company's Global Services Division introduced a series of educational course flows designed to train network operators on advanced services such as VoIP. The course flows already include training on fiber transport, IP VPN and access technologies.

At the edge of the network, veritable newbies tried pounding their stakes into what may be rocky ground (tough to penetrate but a solid foundation once it is). Acme Packet, Netrake, Nextone and Kagoor all vied for position as the next essential network element — the session border controller. Even TippingPoint, more of an intrusion prevention play, scoped out a niche in network security.

Acme Packet, which lost a customer to Netrake earlier in the year, brought a bevy of satisfied customers to the show to make its case for session control. Iskratel, Telefonica de Espana, CommPartners, Ecuity, Global Crossing and Italtel all took the time to co-present with Acme Packet and sing the praises of interoperability, security, regulatory compliance and partnerships.

“There is not a single NAT router we have not been able to traverse using Acme Packet,” said Patrick Chicas, vice president and chief technology officer of CommPartners.

Next year we will have a much better idea of which one of these companies knew where the train was coming through.

VoIP: CONFERENCE PROBES PROMISE

by Jason Ankeny

Voice over IP was a hot-button topic not only at Supercomm 2004 proper but also in the hours leading up to the event: On June 21, Telephony hosted its first-ever conference, “VoIP: Service Provider Strategies,” a daylong analysis of the infrastructure, applications, security, quality and regulatory issues that will define the technology and determine its acceptance in the consumer and enterprise markets.

The event comprised a series of keynote speeches and panels moderated by Telephony editors. “Voice over IP is the next killer app,” said opening keynoter Lori Craven, executive vice president and COO for signaling, switching and applications developer Tekelec. “It's telecom's future.”

Craven cited a recent Frost & Sullivan report projecting VoIP revenues of $1.4 billion by 2007, and balancing present deployment costs against that kind of future revenue potential was one of the conference's dominant talking points. According to Skyline Marketing president John Celentano, service providers have few if any choices but to spend the money necessary to deploy VoIP services immediately, naming increased competition, customer demand and VoIP's potential for reducing provider capex and opex spending as the drivers mandating network evolution. “Bell companies have no choice but to migrate [to VoIP],” Celentano said. “By 2020, I expect the bulk of the network to be converted.”

Celentano stressed that providers must strongly promote VoIP's quality of service, its range of additional applications and services, and its competitive price point. “[VoIP provider] Vonage stressed simplicity and added interesting applications — they've done an excellent job in simplifying their message and their pricing,” agreed Randy Mueller, chief marketing officer for IP service provider Callipso.

Oliver Valente, vice president of technology development at Sprint, said that while data applications will drive VoIP adoption in the future, price is currently the biggest selling point for the carrier's enterprise customers. At least for now, traditional voice service remains the mission-critical application for businesses.

“Every customer we talk to is looking at this space, but they're wrestling with how to manage the IP environment,” Valente said. “Customers are asking for reliable and secure service. [Service providers] must explain the cost savings, and deliver reliability and security. Everyone's interested — the opportunity is huge, but it's still slow going.”

Nor are advanced applications on the radar of the mass market. Studies conducted by market researcher Infonetics indicate the majority of consumers are currently looking to VoIP almost exclusively for basic telephony services, said Kevin Mitchell, the firm's directing analyst of service provider networks and next-gen voice.

Until next-generation applications gain a market foothold, service providers must instead stress that VoIP's core attributes are comparable to those found in legacy technologies. “People buy reliability,” said Mark Whittier, vice president of corporate marketing for hosted IP telephony solutions provider VocalData. “At this stage of the market, more service providers are focusing first on familiar features and delivering them with reliability, security and service.”

But VoIP will also enable applications that legacy systems can't, among them presence management, multimedia and collaboration services. “Adoption will be compelled by convenience and control,” Whittier said. “We'll see VoIP extended to device mobility as fast as the technology can figure out how to do it. VoIP is a ready-made medium for controlling how systems talk to systems, how people talk to each other, and how people talk to systems.”

For now, VoIP adoption remains slow but enormously promising, and while applications will no doubt enhance the its appeal, pricing is still its biggest selling point.

“Consumers don't factor in productivity — they look at price,” said Bryan Sheppeck, vice president of sales at softswitch and broadband product developer Telica. “When people buy VoIP [not for] for flat-rate pricing but to take their service to their vacation home, that's a much stickier surface.”

BROADBAND WIRELESS: WIRELINE INDUSTRY FEELS THE HEAT

by Dan O'Shea

Somewhere in the bowels of the cavernous and ever-expanding McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago, a Sprint executive and a handful of reporters quietly discussed some of the biggest news to come out of the Supercomm 2004 trade show.

The carrier announced to a live crowd of 10 people (with maybe another 12 on the phone) that it's planning to deploy CDMA 1X EV-DO technology in most of its major markets over the next two years — a major shift from the carrier's long-held stance that it would wait for EV-DV technology to mature.

While the details of the announcement were the stuff only a wireless industry crowd could appreciate, the wireline companies roaming the floors above might have been wise to consider this footnote from Oliver Valente, vice president of technology development at Sprint: “With Sprint's Integrated Connection Manager, customers will be able to see what kinds of connections are available to them to access the Internet, whether it's a Wi-Fi connection, EV-DO or even a wireline connection. They can choose the best connection for them given the circumstances.”

While the carrier's connection client software is not a brand-new product, Sprint's announcement at Supercomm and the way Valente spun it as complementary to other broadband offerings is more evidence to support a recurring theme of the last six months or so: Wireline/wireless convergence is happening, and it's largely being driven by wireless companies or firms like Sprint that have re-integrated wireless units that were once free-standing to better pursue a bundled service model.

But, wireline firms might finally be starting to get the memo informing that wireless is a force to be reckoned with — at least that's what a few traditional wireless vendors at Supercomm were saying.

“Wireline companies are starting to want to serve customers' mobile needs as much as possible,” said Kevin Jackson, co-founder and vice president of marketing and product management at Tatara Systems, a company whose service delivery systems have been targeted at Wi-Fi hot spots thus far. However, at Supercomm, Tatara announced that it is now promoting deployment of its system in traditional mobile and wireline networks as well.

“Our platform [the Tatara Mobile Service Access System] has always been agnostic to access network,” Jackson said. “We just tied ourselves to Wi-Fi first because that technology and those providers seemed to have the leverage in the laptop to reach a large number of end users. Now, we see that Wi-Fi is becoming just one part of a bigger equation for carriers.”

Some wireline carriers may be adopting a multi-service stance at least partly in response to an increasing loss of revenue to wireless carriers. But, Jackson also believes that the trend also could be yet another effect of the rise of voice over IP provider Vonage. “What has started to happen with Vonage is a loss of control over end-user applications,” Jackson said. “Now, we see even wireline carriers wanting an application presence on the laptop in some way to stay in front of those customers.”

Virtual network operator iPass is another laptop success story that has influenced these carriers, he said. That enterprise-focused provider has multi-service dialer software “that has been very successful and has more carriers looking at knitting together their services,” he said.

Jackson said Tatara has entered into several trials with wireline carriers, and working in this different type of access realm has required only minor changes to its existing software.

Materna Information and Communications, another vendor traditionally focused at wireless companies, is thinking along the same lines as Tatara, and is seeing some of the same evidence that wireline carriers are ready to go on the offensive to battle the rise of wireless broadband capabilities and applications. The application service provider from Germany has started marketing its short message and multimedia message service centers to wireline carriers, according to Dirk Markner, head of marketing and key account management at Materna.

The company's solutions allow text messages to be sent from mobile devices to wireline-based phone numbers, and translated into voice messages through text-to-speech conversion. Text and multimedia messages also can be sent to TVs in consumers' homes, allowing the creation of new information services, interaction with TV game shows and other applications, such as SMS alerts delivered while residents are watching DVDs, Markner said.

Patrick Dine, vice president, North America at Materna, added that he doesn't believe other mobile messaging technology companies are following Materna into wireline market yet, but that wireline/wireless convergence will soon create a growing opportunity that will be difficult to ignore. He said Materna already supports a live fixed network messaging service for BT, and also has seen some interest from U.S. carriers. “You see wireline companies starting to look at integrated [wireline/wireless] handsets and the idea of integrated services. They're getting interested in this because they don't want to be replaced by the wireless companies,” Dine said. “Once a wireline carrier in the U.S. adopts this kind of service, we think the market for it will break open.”

Materna said it expects competitive local telcos and cable TV companies to lead the way in deploying such services.

The age of converged devices and services also is likely to create more work for Wind River, a middleware company that helps optimize the device development process and de-bug device problems at a system level before they are shipped from manufacturers, said Joerg Baertholdt, vice president of marketing.

The company announced its Wind River Workbench at the show, which speeds testing and de-bugging of device systems. “We can speed the device development cycle,” Baertholdt said. “Two-thirds of devices still have a product development cycle of about a year, but with some of the newest devices in Asia, this cycle is now down to six weeks. It's getting very competitive out there, but the devices are increasingly complex and difficult to optimize. This is something that can help whether the device is a mobile phone, a voice over IP phone or something else.”

ROADM: SADDLING UP WITH NEW GEAR

by Ed Gubbins

Supercomm 2004 saw considerably more new product announcements than 2003, adding a chorus to the tone of increased activity and positivity at the show.

In the optical equipment sector, several vendors clamored to declare the addition of reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexing (ROADM) technology to their product portfolios. In the week before the show, start-up vendor Mahi Networks announced its acquisition of the assets of ROADM vendor Photuris Networks. That same week, Movaz Networks unveiled its own ROADM device: the 10-rack-unit RayROADM, designed to allow carriers to collapse multiple stacked metro rings without the optical-electrical-optical conversion of a cross-connect. At the show, Movaz's partner, Lucent Technologies, announced the addition of the first product to be jointly developed by the two companies: Lucent's Metropolis Wavelength Services Manager, which is being tested this summer by T-Com, a division of German carrier Deutsche Telekom.

Cisco Systems announced from the show floor that the next release of its ONS 15454 multiservice provisioning platform (MSPP), available in the third quarter, would include ROADM functionality. Likewise, Tellabs introduced new hardware and software features for its 7100 dense wavelength-division multiplexing system that includes Sonet multiplexing and ROADM functionality, and are scheduled for wide release in the fourth quarter. And Meriton Networks announced the addition of ROADM features to its metro core optical switch that will begin trials in the fourth quarter for general availability early next year.

Alcatel, which is rumored to be relying on a partnership with start-up vendor Tropic Networks to address the ROADM market, used the show to unveil its new cross-connect, the 1671 Service Connect, a replacement for the vendor's 1631 LMC wideband cross-connect, used by more than 40 customers in North America. With its capacity to aggregate frame relay and ATM traffic for handoff to IP networks, the 1671 is intended to give carriers an easy migration path to IP/MPLS networks.

Fujitsu Network Communications, well-known for its success in the North American ADM market, challenged crossconnect vendors at Supercomm by unveiling switching cards for its flagship Flashwave 4500 MSPP that allow carriers to essentially convert it into a switching platform that can serve the functions of a crossconnect.

Ethernet was also a major topic of conversation at Supercomm 2004, which featured none other than the technology's co-creator, Bob Metcalfe, in a panel discussion.

On the convention's final day, the IEEE ratified the Ethernet First Mile standard, 802.3ah, for transmitting Ethernet over copper and fiber access networks.

The ability to handle Ethernet traffic was a common theme among plenty of new product announcements at the show. Turin Networks unveiled its TraverseEdge 100, a 2.5-Gb/s Sonet ADM and Ethernet pizza box for use in multidwelling units, outside cabinets or central offices. ADM vendor White Rock Networks announced its first entry into the access market with the VLX2006, an OC-48 Sonet pizza box that allows carriers to offer 14 protected DS-1s, three protected DS-3s or eight Fast Ethernet or gigabit Ethernet links. Wave7 Optics, a vendor of fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) equipment, introduced its newest platform as “advanced fiber-to-the-curb”: the LMG-888, a higher-density version of the vendor's last-mile gateway that includes eight Fast Ethernet ports, eight POTS ports and eight RF video connections for triple-play services.

Nayna Networks, whose FTTP approach includes an emphasis on high-definition TV, unveiled a suite of four new customer premises devices based on the 802.3ah standard, including one for Ethernet-based FTTP networks and another one for 10/100/1000 Mb/s services.

And Supercomm's SuperQUEST committee bestowed its best new optical product of the year award on RBN for its GigaEdge 2330 MSPP, which multiplexes Ethernet, storage area networking and Sonet traffic together — a product that made its public debut at the show (see story on page 26).

With Ethernet services in demand across the edge of today's network, Ethernet equipment will no doubt be demanded in far greater volume than ROADM gear, but to listen to the din of eager, competing vendors at Supercomm 2004, you might not know it.

FTTN: REGULATING THE TECHNOLOGY

by Donny Jackson

For the most part, Supercomm is about technology. But even the best technical solutions won't a generate profits unless the rules allow it, which is why some of the show's biggest announcements included at least a regulatory component.

The trend was reinforced from the opening keynote, when SBC Communications Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre announced plans for a $6 billion fiber network build that would begin soon “under the right conditions,” specifically “the right kind of regulatory treatment for IP networks.”

There were no clues whether the FCC would grant Whitacre's wish for no unbundling obligations for SBC's new network, most of which would utilize fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) architecture. With each node serving 300 to 500 homes, SBC plans to deliver 15 to 25 Mb/s of voice, video and high-speed Internet access to residential customers while being able to leverage its existing copper plant for the connection into the home.

The notion of FTTN seemed to catch FCC Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy off-guard. While stating her belief that carriers building fiber-to-the-premises or fiber-to-the-curb networks should not have to unbundle elements for competitors at regulated prices, Abernathy declined to take a stance on the FTTN proposal made by Whitacre hours earlier.

“I'm not going to say a word,” Abernathy said. “I haven't really thought about it yet. It gives us more work to do, clearly.”

But at least Abernathy addressed the FTTN issue, something FCC Chairman Michael Powell did not do during his keynote discussion with Telecommunications Industry Association President Matthew Flanigan. Like Flanigan, Powell expressed support for the Bush administration's decision not to ask the Supreme Court to reinstate unbundling rules that had been eliminated the previous week.

After the keynote, Powell told reporters he thought the FCC could adopt interim unbundling rules within two weeks, but that has proven to be an overly optimistic estimate, as the draft of interim rules reportedly was not prepared until last week. Industry officials only hope Powell's prediction that telecom will be “hot” during next year's Supercomm is more accurate.

Powell said the FCC needs help from Congress to “clear the regulatory underbrush” that is hindering the deployment of advanced technologies. As all forms of communication — such as voice, video and high-speed Internet access-are delivered as data over myriad networks, regulatory categories such as cable, telecommunications services and information services don't fit any more, Powell said. However, he said the FCC must try to make new technologies fit into these definitions until Congress rewrites the rules.

United States Telecom Association President and CEO Walter McCormick echoed this sentiment.

“The FCC can do an awful lot, but Congress needs to step in,” McCormick said in an interview with Telephony. “As Chairman Powell said, the FCC is operating under a statute that requires it to make service distinctions that are no longer relevant.”

McCormick called for regulators to “get out of the way” in all areas of telecom where consumers have viable alternatives, but most said it is premature to deregulate legacy telecom networks. However, Supercomm included numerous speakers calling for federal officials to pre-empt state commissions from regulating providers of the next generation of voice over IP.

Powell and Abernathy both reiterated this opinion, and a panel on IP regulation featured two state commissioners — California's Susan Kennedy and Florida's Charles Davidson — asking for pre-emption on VoIP. However, Kennedy noted that she is in the minority among state commissioners on this issue and that pre-emption will be a legal and political struggle as states try to preserve their right to tax voice-calling providers that is tied to their regulatory powers.

“You're talking about life and death, that's how local policy-makers and officials will look at this,” Kennedy said. “It's so important because [states] have jurisdiction, and taking it away from the states is going to be the hardest thing that you've ever tried to do.”

Another hot regulatory topic at the show was spectrum policy — most notably, the rules surrounding the airwaves at 600 MHz and 700 MHz used by broadcasters to deliver analog signals.

Given the limited audience that still watches over-the-air programming, former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt — now a senior advisor at McKinsey & Co. — suggested the government pay to ensure that all viewers can receive digital signals. Doing so would clear broadcasters from “prime” spectrum that has the propagation characteristics that would allow the promise of wireless broadband to become a reality at prices that are affordable enough to sustain profitable business models.

However, ArrayComm CEO Marty Cooper said clearing the spectrum would be of limited value if the FCC continues to auction airwaves to the highest bidders, which typically are deep-pocketed corporations that have little incentive to utilize spectrum efficiently.