OPEN ARCHITECTURE INITIATIVES HELP TELECOM ALTER ITS WAYS

Add “open” to the list of buzzwords flying around the Supercomm 2005 show floor this week. As service providers and their equipment vendors work to make operations cheaper and more flexible while maintaining their reliability, the telecom industry is increasingly turning to open computer networking technology.

Two separate initiatives — the Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) hardware platform specification being developed by the PCI Industrial Computers Manufacturing Group (PICMG) and the Open Communications Architecture Forum (OCAF) — are making major moves at the show, either on their own or through the companies deploying their technology.

As a backdrop to those efforts, the push continues to move Linux, as an open computing standard, into the telecom environment as well. OCAF will introduce the first public draft of its Carrier Grade Open Environment framework at a Wednesday press conference (see story on page 49).

Boards meeting the ATCA standard made their debut a year ago at Supercomm 2004, but commercial products are much more prevalent this year, said Benoit Robert, executive director of telecom product development for Kontron, which is introducing three new ATCA-related products at the show.

“Last year, we did show our first board,” he said. “But this year, there will be many more boards — more of the complete story — with chassis, switch, module, plug-in module; all kinds of communications products will be launched.”

This year's show will feature an ATCA plugfest to prove interoperability of the different products, said Sven Freudenfeld, business development of telecom for Kontron. In addition, Kontron will conduct booth demonstrations of key applications, including an IP multimedia subsystems billing application and a transport application for audio and video codecs.

Hardware meeting the ATCA spec is now moving into equipment manufactured for telecom networks because of two key business drivers, said John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer for Wind River, another ATCA player. “These off-the-shelf standards make it so that equipment manufacturers can focus on applications and not on the software and hardware infrastructure that support the applications,” he said.

Last week, Alcatel and Intel announced they would collaborate on ATCA platform development, specifically to design subsystem building blocks that will increase standardization and component interoperability within the mobile telecom industry.

PICMG has estimated the ATCA market to be worth $5 billion by 2007; analyst estimates range from $3.7 billion (RHK) to $20 billion (Crystal Cube Consulting/Metz International Ltd.).

One advantage to the open source approach is that telecom companies can develop new services without being saddled with a service-specific network architecture, Freudenfeld said.

“In the past, with proprietary systems, they were stuck with what they purchased,” he said. “They don't want to rip it out. With hot-swappable blades built to a standard, you can swap in and swap out new blades, and you don't even replace the hardware. There is very little risk and practically no down time.”

But veteran telecom industry analyst Tom Nolle cautioned against the assumption that all carriers are rushing to adopt open computing standards.

“Back-end IT software in the telecom industry isn't fundamentally different from back-end IT software in any other industry, so it is susceptible, to some degree, to penetration by open-source software,” he said. “But there has to be a reason for a telecom company to want to go to the trouble to port an application to open-source software because it probably isn't running on that now. In the past, [telecom companies] have been more sensitive to the cost of migration. So I don't think that you will see the telecom vertical be a particular fast mover to open source.”