BELL CANADA/NORTEL TRIALS HARBINGER OF VoIP ROLLOUTS

As CLECs disappear, ILECs migrate more slowly to packet technology

Bell Canada's so-called commercial voice-over-IP trial should squelch any notions that carriers will go “soft” in 2002. Without pressure from CLECs, the Canadian telco can test IP-based features conservatively with select commercial customers in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec while clinging to its existing switched infrastructure.

Bell Canada is using Nortel Networks' Interactive Multimedia Server (IMS) platform to drive multimedia services to existing phone sets and to take advantage of soft clients running on PCs and personal digital assistants. Its offerings include personal call management that customizes how and when calls are received, instant video calling without pre-arranging conferencing facilities, hot desking to mobilize phone numbers and calling preferences and collaborative messaging to share files and Web pages or engage in interactive whiteboard sessions.

The trial follows a strategy that is “absolutely a necessity for rapid adoption of the technology,” said Dan Mangelsdorf, Nortel's vice president of carrier VoIP marketing.

“Look at the investment we made in voice over IP,” he said. “It was to drive scalable cost reductions and transform circuit networks to packet. We began investing two years ago to drive new services in a packet environment.”

Bell Canada bought the new services part; packetizing is another matter.

“We're not going to be replacing our [public network] Centrex service with this,” said James Woodcroft, Bell Canada's director of local access product management. “We're going to be enhancing it with added feature functionality.”

The trial gives customers a “springboard to start looking at what it means to converge their voice and data networks,” he added.

It's a sensible approach and a wise investment for Bell Canada, said Laura Gooding, senior analyst for Pioneer Consulting. “They can use it to extend services across their network,” she said. “To go from clumsily administered Centrex applications to each individual user having control over their own call routing is a huge leap forward.”

Still, it's not pure IP, and it's “not quite as forward-looking as some of the start-up competitors” that were going full throttle IP before the market collapsed last year, said Tom Valovic, program director of IP Telephony for IDC. “I've been saying all along that IP telephony is a three-steps-forward, two-steps-backward thing.”

Carriers understand IP's advantages and will pursue them — to a point. Technology such as Nortel's IMS melds soft advantages with hard networks and gives end users the benefit of having richer communications, video, collaboration, instant messaging and a richer communications experience, Mangelsdorf said.

Generally slow to adopt and deploy new technologies, established carriers are being cautious, which affects the pace of IP development, said Paul Ritchie, executive director of the International Softswitch Consortium.

But established carriers — including those conducting unannounced IP telephony trials — are the only players with money now because of the crumbling CLEC market. This scenario has halted rapid-fire innovation, Ritchie said.

“When you have companies that are evaporating and hundreds of people looking for other jobs, it's a slowdown,” he said.

As a result, softswitch and applications server developments are one to two years behind original projections, Valovic said. This gives industry giants such as Nortel and Lucent Technologies a foot in the IP door with products that are neither hard nor soft. “If you're an incumbent, the name of the game is migration,” Valovic said.

Eventually, the migration will reach its IP end, said Linda Manchester, vice president and general manager of Lucent's Universal Gateway business.

Established carriers are “moving a little faster than they were a couple of years ago from the lab to a small environment and then deployment,” she said. “It's not taking years anymore. But it's also not taking days, as sometimes was the case a couple of years ago.”

That's because there's a new cost-conscious model in play.

“It's back to basics this year. It's not all about IP for IP's sake; it's about how to migrate to IP intelligently and cost-effectively,” Gooding said. “The operators who have succeeded and are doing well today are the ones who paid attention to the basics early on.”

And they're the ones who can take their time about changing the world, even if they move more slowly than vendors might like.

“Nortel wants to make the multimedia service available starting in Q2 of this year,” said Bell Canada's Woodcroft. “Realistically, we're going to take a little longer than that.”