AT&T exec puts NGN onus on vendors

BOSTON--AT&T CTO Hossein Eslambolchi offered attendees of the Next Generation Networks conference yesterday a broad glimpse of where and how the carrier giant will spend its network investment dollars during this decade. However, big vendors may have to keep their small counterparts alive to earn that money.

Eslambolchi said he expects AT&T to continue investing in IP networking to the point where all of the carrier’s voice traffic will run over IP by 2010. Still, the biggest challenges in making that expectation come to fruition is the network management complexity the migration requires, and the lack of sufficient automated management tools to address that complexity, he said.

“If you calculate telecom complexity as the number of technology protocol domains times the number of networks per domain, times the average number of internetwork interfaces required by these different protocols, that is a hugely complex project for us. We can’t transition all our customers to IP by taking them off-line,” said Eslambolchi. “It would take 100,000 people working five years to migrate all of our trunks, and we don’t have 100,000 people.”

Also president of AT&T Labs, Eslambolchi said he has talked to more than 50 venture capitalists in the last two months who have convinced him the software innovation necessary to make the management task easier is happening inside small, nimble start-up vendors, but he is concerned that some of these innovations won’t see the light of day. He put the onus on big vendors to make sure that doesn’t happen.

“Don’t let them die,” he said. “The big vendors need to work with them. More industry partnership is needed to bring about important IP software innovations.”

Eslambolchi acknowledges that IP is far from perfect, but that its cost efficiencies are undeniable, which is why AT&T and other carriers need to migrate. He said IP equipment being tested and deployed by AT&T still experiences about 150 defects per million, while ATM and frame relay equipment, for comparison, is closer to the 20 DPM range.

“In the 21st century, it won’t be who has the best hardware, but the best software. That’s where the pressure is for innovation with IP. That is how the DPM number is going to come down,” he said.

Specifically, carriers need to see more predictive and proactive management and security tools, Eslambolchi said. The goal is an “automated, self-operating network. We may not be investing in boxes as much, but we are increasing our investment in the software that creates the self-operating network,” he said, adding that AT&T increased its software spending by 25% last year, and plans to boost it again next year.

NGN co-chairman John McQuillan was quick to point out that that such vendor co-dependence Eslambolchi is asking for goes against “the DNA of most vendors,” but Eslambolchi urged a focus on the big picture result of such cooperation.

“We’re not going to invest on an equipment-by-equipment basis anymore. We are going to think about the best end-to-end picture before we spend any money and it will not all go to the vendor with the best box,” he said.