Bullish on wireless - and dial-up

Old world realities temper new world innovations

Broadband 2000 in San Jose last week was a conflicted show. Visions of the network of the future clashed with today's realities. As keynote speaker Leo Hindery, CEO of Global Crossing, projected the growth of wireless networking, providers were looking for a road map to get there without cannibalizing their existing dial-up user base.

Despite the U.S.'s lead in broadband efforts, Hindery is afraid the country will lose that edge as CDMA, TDMA, GSM and iDEN struggle to become the leading wireless standard. Because none has established itself as a national standard, the U.S. trails Europe in wireless usage, applications and quality.

"We're so far behind it's pitiful," Hindery said. "The [U.S. spectrum] auctions should have been held last November. There are four standards - and four lobbying efforts; we should just let them run their course."

Still, Hindery wasn't advocating a government mandate. "I don't think the FCC should declare a standard, but it should step back from the business and let the market pick a winner," he said.

Hindery has high hopes for untethered networking. "In less than five years, half of the traffic on Global Crossing's network will be wireless," he projected. On the access side, DSL, cable modems and wireless technologies each will own a third of the broadband access market, he added.

To support that assumption, perceptions must be changed. Broadband, Hindery said, is a poor word choice. "All services will be delivered at varying speeds and capacities. It's not either slow or fast access or high-speed or nothing," he said.

Start-up Telica hasn't forgotten the "slow" end customer in the migration to the new, "fast" world. The company made its debut at the show and outlined plans for its Plexus line of intelligent broadband switching systems (see figure). The first product, the Plexus 9000, will support narrowband and broadband access with SS7 signaling so providers won't be required to deploy a Class 5 switch, said Ali Kafel, vice president of marketing for Telica.

"As carriers build converged networks, the access side continues to diverge," he said. He agrees that DSL, cable and high-speed wireless will segment the access market further, but dial-up modems still are a big business today. By the end of this year there will be 170 million narrowband users.

"We are facilitating convergence but not forcing it," Kafel said. "Convergence is happening, no doubt, but probably not as fast as some people exp ect it."

The Plexus 9000 will help carriers migrate while enabling them to support the huge number of dial-up customers by aggregating voice, data, DSL and dial-up access lines through the optical core. Wireless support will be added by the end of 2001.

"We sit at the edge of the core network and integrate the functionality of three boxes: the Class 5 switch, voice-over-DSL [gateway] and the ATM switch fabric," Kafel said. "To the ILEC we look like a Class 5 switch."

The Plexus terminates voice and data traffic and has integrated SS7, call control, call processing and service management functionality. It supports multiple access types - and it has redundant I/O modules. Further technical details will be provided when the product formally launches in late summer.

The Plexus has piqued the interest of Ron Westfall, an analyst with Current Analysis. The Telica solution, he said, "is integrating broadband switching with the support of SS7 intelligence into a new type of broadband platform."

The market is crowded with similar devices, Westfall added, but most focus on data or voice - not both. Competing as a start-up presents additional challenges.

"Lucent and Nortel will be able to leverage their installed bases," he said. "There is a lot of investment out there with the existing technology."

Still, Telica is targeting both incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) and competitive LECs (CLECs) and has raised $60 million in funding from investors, including an equity investment of less than 5% from Redback Networks, said Shailesh Shukla, director of strategy and business development at Redback. Telica's Plexus 9000 "will give us the opportunity to do the same thing we did for broadband and apply it to the world of dial-up," Shukla said. ISPs will no longer have to handle modem pooling, and ILECs can sell outsourced modem services, he added.