The choice is yours: CMA event shows business customers their options

Because the corporate telecommunications niche is both a profit mine and a proving ground for new developments, carriers and vendors must keep that important customer base educated about services and technologies on the rise.

That educational effort was underway last week at the Communications Managers Association's CMA Telcom Conference and Expo in New York, an annual gathering of corporate information technology professionals.

It is telling that two of the keynote speakers at CMA Telcom '97 came from Qwest Communications and Teleport Communications Group, two network operators that are rallying against the telecom establishment. These are the representatives of the fight for open competition, and they spoke to the business community with the characteristic drive and defensiveness of the underdog.

"The market has not become efficient yet in economic terms, which means that the choice this conference is addressing has not been fully realized," said Joseph Nacchio, president and chief executive officer of Qwest. Nacchio, a long-time AT&T executive, is now planning to go head-to-head with his former employer by building a nationwide long-haul fiber network, which the company plans to have fully lit by the second quarter of 1999.

The twist for Qwest is that its networks are being optimized for data transport, which the company views as an edge over incumbents that must adapt voice platforms for an increasingly data-centric world.

"Anybody who has an installed base of voice traffic is going to move very slow," Nacchio said. "Anyone who doesn't is going to move very fast."

TCG also is building a competitive network from the ground up, attempting to usurp local incumbents by offering better and cheaper switched services, high-speed asynchronous transfer mode, Internet access and long-distance to business customers.

"An industry has risen to provide better quality and better service than the [Bell companies]," said Robert Annunziata, chairman and chief executive officer of TCG. "A total portfolio of products and services helps you grow in the business community."

That community knows what broadband service options are available but not necessarily what transport technologies can be used to carry them, Annunziata said.

"They know about fiber," he said. "What we need to educate them on is that broadband is not just fiber, it's a mix of fiber and wireless." Teleport recently acquired BizTel Communications, which holds broadband wireless licenses in the 38 GHz spectrum range, and plans to use wireless as an access method in some regions.

Carriers are heavily focused on giving business customers more bandwidth-a phenomenon created by the growth of the Internet and the subsequent popularity of TCP/IP data networking. "Networks are becoming more than just providers of transport services," Nacchio said. "Networks themselves are becoming the applications."

A keynote speaker representing the equipment vendor side echoed the carriers' sentiments that businesses need networks designed to go beyond voice, but she warned that there is a quality question based on the expectations the voice tradition has fostered.

"People will come to expect all their communications needs to be met the way the voice network does it: simply, dependably and at a low cost of ownership," said Patricia Russo, executive vice president and chief staff officer at Lucent Technologies.

"The pressure is on data networking companies-including us-to bring the performance and reliability of the data networks up to voice standards," she said.