Alcatel to hawk Turnstone loop-management solutions

Alcatel and Turnstone today announced Alcatel has agreed to market and sell Turnstone’s suite of loop-management products in conjunction with its own broadband access product offerings.

In addition, Alcatel will include the Turnstone product portfolio in its support organization, said Jeff Aaron, director of partner marketing for Turnstone.

“On a global basis, if a customer signs up for Turnstone support through Alcatel, then Alcatel would provide the first and second levels of support to that customer, with Turnstone providing the third level,” he added.

Alcatel selected Turnstone for this partnership due to its reputation as a supplier of “best-of-breed” products, on multiple levels, according to Elvis Oxley, Alcatel’s marketing and business development manager for DSL products.

“We put all of our OEM agreements through very strict [testing]. Turnstone was not the only company involved in that RFP (request for proposal), but they turned out to be a very good fit for us,” he explained. “The ASAM is the world’s most widely deployed DSLAM (digital subscriber loop access multiplexer) and … we needed not only best of breed in the technology, but also a solution that that was the most widely available in terms of deployment.”

Aaron said the two companies have a history with one another, which added to Alcatel’s comfort level.

“We’ve had some previous OSS integration efforts, … so the fact that we had an open API (application programming interface) that was flexible and easy to integrate … was a key differentiator that helped Turnstone stand out in terms of fulfilling the Alcatel portfolio,” he said.

Oxley indicated Alcatel has been a longtime advocate of loop management and decided it was time to add the capability to its product offering, based on customer demand.

“We’ve always felt that it is absolutely critical from the standpoint of reducing the time to deployment, meeting the extensive demand for DSL and reducing the truck rolls associated with DSL deployment,” he said.

Aaron said loop management always has been important to CLECs, which have to contend with ILEC infrastructures and need a way to ensure they get what they require to provision services. Now, however, the ILECs also have begun to pay attention to loop management.

“Now that DSL is really starting to hit its stride--instead of thousands of loops being turned up each week, we’re seeing tens of thousands--there’s really a lot of pressure on the ILECs to manage and automate that process,” Aaron said.