Allied Telesyn pitches triple play

Allied Telesyn threw it’s hat into the increasingly crowded “triple play” vendor market with the official launch today of its IP DSLAM.

The new 7000 series of DSLAMs, which includes the 7700 designed for central offices and the smaller 7400 geared as a hardened chassis for outdoor placement, has enough capacity to handle up to 512 channels of video along with voice and high-speed data. The company, whose biggest customer is NTT in Japan, also has announced that Midwest Telnet, a consortium of eight telcos in Wisconsin and Matanuska Telephone in Palmer, Alaska, have deployed the DSLAMs.

Like many of its competitors into the IP DSLAM market, Allied Telesyn is aiming at the 1500 or so independent telcos in the U.S., believing that they will be easier to sell on IP-based video delivery than the RBOCs.

“In the next 18 months, every IOC in the U.S. is going to investigate triple play. IP is going to win in the service provide space just as it won in the enterprise space,” said Howard Kamerer, COO of Allied Telesyn. “It’s just going to take a little bit longer.” In the company’s platform, a star-architecture backplane provides enough capacity to support up to 272 users per unit in the 7700 (112 users for the 7400). While that may not appear as large as some competitors, Philip Jopa, CTO of Allied Telesyn, said numbers can be deceiving.

“When people quote video streams, they tend to forget things,” he said.

Key among them is all the overhead associated with video. In a 2.5 Mb video stream, for instance, the amount of bandwidth required actually is closer to 3.2 Mb.