Tending the flame: Keeping the fires burning for multiservice switching

Like Nortel, Alcatel has outpaced the market and moved to second place in market share. And like Nortel, it did so by continuing to invest in its products.

“We continually add new features, provide exceptionally good tech support and regularly scheduled maintenance upgrades,” Guillet said. “There are a lot of very large and fully operational multiservice networks out there generating tremendous cash flow for service providers that intend to operate them as long as possible. Our philosophy is for them to do that, we need to keep investing in that portfolio.”

The company's investment plan is two-fold: prepare for the future all-IP world and continue to refine the functionality of its flagship 7670 Routing Switch Platform and 5620 Network Manager.

The 7670 RSP was built with a dual control plane: one for ATM and the other for IP/MPLS.

“In general, people want a multiservice switch to do native ATM switching. But the IP/MPLS control plane is also an important attribute for operators looking to leverage their investment in this world that will be all IP,” Guillet said.

Like any technology that hopes to remain relevant, it must not only continue to support critical services, it must, as Guillet said, “offer a way forward.” Alcatel rode the wave of wireless backhaul to grow its market share and hopes to play a key role as operators break up their traditional Class 5 switches and deploy media gateways and softswitches in the new distributed architecture for MSCs, but it's the dual control plane that provides Alcatel's customers their way forward.

“Alcatel is already winning its share of the MPLS-based infrastructure business,” Guillet said. “But service providers around the world will migrate their customers and service types at different rates based on local configurations and [especially] competition. So it is good that we have a solution that accommodates that migration from many different starting points.”

Both Nortel's and Alcatel's multiservice switches offer ways to introduce new IP services over ATM, even Ethernet over ATM. And as long as the management and quality-of-service issues around Ethernet remain, there may yet be a continuing need for the old ATM-based multiservice switch, its relevance secure for another day.