RedBack emerges victorious again

The contracts just keep coming, a monthly occurance for RedBack Networks. The company announced last week that it has inked a deal with Washington-based DSL access provider, DigitalSelect. The service provider will purchase RedBack's Subscriber Management System 1000s to facilitate deployment in four new markets.

DigitalSelect will use the SMS 1000s in the Atlanta; Philadelphia; Raleigh, N.C.; and Washington areas and sell access on both a wholesale and retail basis.

"It will basically be divided 50/50 between wholesale and retail," said Peter Arey, president of DigitalSelect. The company plans to wholesale DSL access to smaller ISPs and resellers (see figure).

In addition to the SMS 1000's scalability, DigitalSelect was interested in the services it enables and the speed with which new users and services can be added, Arey said.

"Research has said the world is moving from straight connectivity to more value-added services," said Mark Weiner, director of marketing for RedBack. "DigitalSelect is using RedBack's platform to offer those value-adds," he said.

The product's flexibility also will appeal to other service providers.

"RedBack has been the solution purchased by a number of service providers," said Paula Reinman, vice president of consulting at TeleChoice. "They have been very successful in the scope of increasing operational efficiency, reducing cost of provisioning and [reducing] the cost of installing service."

That ease of installation is part of a two-pronged challenge that service providers face in deploying DSL access. Within the next few months, multiple high-speed options will be available in the top 25 major metropolitan areas, so service providers must focus efforts on the actual services they offer, Reinman said.

"The service providers have a double challenge because they need to make it easy and routine for people to get DSL service, and they are working hard to develop new services," she said. "The RedBack position goes along with that reasoning in that they say they make it easier to deploy and provision and add new services."