May 10, 2005 4:20 PM,

Tellabs lands more MCI business

By Carol Wilson

MCI Communications, already a customer of Tellabs' multiservice edge system, is expanding its use of that technology as part of its Converged Packet Access network.

More on this Topic

Industry News

Blogs

Briefing Room

MCI announced last week that it has added a global Ethernet service to its CPA initiative, originally launched in July of 2004.

The Tellabs MultiservicePLuS product is designed to allow service providers to support both legacy and new services within an IP network as part of a strategy to create a single converged infrastructure. That capability is at the heart of MCI's CPA network, said Michael Marcellin, director of VPN and data services product management for MCI.

The contract is a significant one for Tellabs, which is one of several vendors with multi-service strategies. The market for multi-service gear has not taken off as quickly as expected.

"It is an important announcement for us because it shows MCI expanding the breadth of our product into new areas, which speaks to the flexibility of [Tellabs] 8800 platform and multi-service solution," said Mike O'Malley, portfolio marketing manager at Tellabs. Because the Tellabs 8800, the multi-service switch router at the heart of the Tellabs MultiservicePLuS solution, can handle traffic at both Layer 2 (ATM and frame relay) and Layer 3 (IP), it offers maximum flexibility, he added.

In announcing its choice of the Tellabs system, MCI cited capabilities including any-to-any service interworking, and optimized handling of both legacy and new data services.

MCI's move "could be a model for others in terms of demonstrating capabilities and different applications," said O'Malley. He expects to see more service providers moving to multi-service solutions but pointed out the difficulty of that process.

"You have to keep in mind the size of the task at hand--collapsing ATM, frame and IP and Ethernet into a converged solution is not a small undertaking," he said. That combined with the size of the carriers we are talking about deploying--it's a significant undertaking from a carrier perspective."