Cisco in blissful relationship with service providers

Cisco identified several service provider customers this week across a wide range of technologies and services to showcase the company’s growing depth in the telecom market.

Along with enhancement to existing products and the introduction of a WAN access performance management system, Cisco announced customer wins in the voice market for its Broadband Local Integrated Services Solution (BLISS,) the Voice Infrastructure and Application (VIA) transport services framework and its managed voice services.

For more information on Cisco’s strategic direction, see next week’s cover story (Dec 9th) in Telephony (www.telephonyonline.com.)

Cisco partnered with Visual Networks to create its integrated WAN access performance management system. The new system leverages intelligence within Cisco’s network devices to measure end-to-end performance metrics without the need for standalone probes in the network.

“We basically obviated the need for those client resident probes by building additional intelligence into our IOS [software,]” said Kurt Dahm, director of business development at Cisco. “At up to $2000 for each probe, this market introduction lets us significantly lower the cost of deployment for service providers.”

Verizon is wrapping up testing on the system and expects to be deploying it in the first quarter of next year, according to Cisco.

Along with the WAN access solution, Cisco enhanced its information center fault management platform to allow it to cross-correlate events with layer-three service capability and the customer profiles the events impact. The platform also includes a publish-and-subscribe feature that lets operations personnel broadcast configurations to all affected network devices.

“It gets you beyond the device-by-device management paradigm we have been plagued with for so many years,” Dahm said.

FastWeb and Sweden’s Bredbandsbolaget (B2) have begun using Cisco’s BLISS metro Ethernet solution for integrating high-speed Internet, local and long-distance voice and video services, as well as hosted services such as storage. FastWeb launched two months ago based on an H.323 architecture while B2 is a new implementation based on SIP.

“BLISS is targeted at metro Ethernet, especially in Europe and Asia where the density of multi-unit dwellings makes routing fiber to those locations very cost-effective,” said John Shaw, director of marketing at Cisco.

ITXC and SingTel have meanwhile have deployed packet voice services based on Cisco’s VIA transport framework. As part of the new version of VIA, Cisco offers an SS7 micro-pop solution that it says reduces the cost of deploying an SS7 point-of-presence by 15% to 20%.

In the meantime, Equant and Sprint have begun offering bundled managed voice services using Cisco’s multi-service VPN and managed IP telephony solutions.

“The combination of these solutions in conjunction with what we are dong on the enterprise IP telephony side enable service providers to build a picture that talks about the ability to manage multiple customer end points that are either IP telephony-based or legacy-based, business or residential, over various broadband access methodologies,” Shaw said.