Preaching to the choir

(Telephony) While preaching mostly to the choir at a voice-over-DSL session at DSLcon this week, Jetstream’s vice president of marketing Stephen Gleave said the success of VoDSL is “all about mass.”

Gleave said incumbent carriers are the ones who will bring the world VoDSL because they are the only players with the necessary scale.

“[Voice-over-DSL] will happen, and it will happen with a big carrier,” Gleave said. “And it will happen because of mass.”

It also will happen in the residential market first, “because the big carriers own that market,” Gleave said.

VoDSL will require mass in the systems that support it as well.

“It will require thousands of [integrated access devices] priced for mass consumption and it will take mass subscriber management,” Gleave said.

Others agree that the VoDSL market will be the land of the ILEC.

“We may not have been first to market, but we were the first to understand that the ILECs would dominate the VoDSL market,” said Martin Taylor, chief technology officer at CopperCom.

However, when the ILECs will begin to inhabit that land is unclear.

“Nobody wants to be first to stand up and say they will jump into voice over DSL,” Gleave said.

Fima Vaisman, vice president of marketing at Accelerated Networks agreed.

“They know they want to go packet,” Vaisman said. “They just don’t know how or when.”

Vaisman said before incumbent carriers will even consider deploying VoDSL they will require a choice between several carrier-grade gateways and other equipment.

“They need product that can scale,” Vaisman said. “Lucent, Nortel and others have spent 30 years [developing] their product. They aren’t going to front-end it with a device that will [adversely affect] it.”

Not everyone believes that incumbents will usher in VoDSL. Peter LeBlanc, vice president of marketing for Aware, touted his company’s new channelized VoDSL solution as being a low-cost migration option for next-generation networks. He says it will be adopted by the CLEC market.

“It enables digital loop carrier and next generation DSLAMs to support derived voice,…and it is less complicated on the CPE/IAD side,” LeBlanc said.

Chided for his stance on the CLEC market LeBlanc said, “No VoDSL is being deployed today, so let’s take a step back and think about this.”