New Covad CTO promises nationwide Ethernet offerings

Covad Communications' new chief technology officer has plans to evolve Covad's national IP backbone into an MPLS-based core that supports a wider variety of Ethernet services for Covad's wholesale customers. Aamir Hussain is also hoping to leverage his past experience at Telus, Qwest Communications and AT&T to develop better relationships with the incumbent carriers that provide Covad last-mile access to its customers.

At the same time, Hussain said, Covad is exploring its wireless last-mile options.

"Wireless is a critical part of our strategy as well," Hussain said. "Today we use wireless to provide T1 access to businesses, but tomorrow, once we have enabled our network with an MPLS core and have started to offer Ethernet services over wireless as well, that access will be even more important."

Hussain comes to Covad from Telus, where he was vice president of national planning, engineering and capital management, and helped lead Telus – and before that, Qwest -- through the same kind of network transformation Covad is facing.

"When I look at Covad, I look at a company that is trying to reinvent itself, and I look at a network that can provide lots of capabilities," Hussain said. "Those are a couple of things that really attracted me to Covad. Some of the things that I have done at Telus can be easily replicated here. We have a network that spans across 2000 [central offices] and 58 million [points of presence], and we can not only provide what we are offering today but also add Ethernet layer-two and layer-three VPN services. There is a lot that can be done with the network, a lot that can be done for customers. So from a network perspective, we have to take it through another evolution process to ensure it can support the latest and greatest type of service."

That will mean evolving Covad's national network, which the company has been expanding over the past year to a single MPLS core, Hussain said, and migrating off legacy services such as ATM, initially used to support Covad's DSL network.

Coming from more of an incumbent background, Hussain admits he has much to learn about the regulatory environment facing competitive service providers.

"That is probably my biggest challenge is to understand the regulatory environment a little better," Hussain said. "We don't own our own access infrastructure – we have to go to the ILECs to get access. As we continue this journey, we have to develop better relationships with the ILECs and make sure we have the right kind of service level agreements in place to deliver what our customers need."

Hussain's familiarity with the ILEC community will pay off, he believes.

"Absolutely I think it will," Hussain said. "I know a lot of C-level executives. I know the technical teams and how we can pair better with them. That is the knowledge I bring to the table, and we will work hard."

Covad's ability to differentiate going forward depends on how well the company leverages its national footprint to deliver newer Ethernet services and more, Hussain said. "Our differentiation is the nationwide footprint," he said. "We can quickly launch services with quality of service, class of service, layer-two and layer-three VPNs – we have developed those internally, and now we can roll them out to our customers."