SBC’s Ireland gives glimpse of technology strategy

Southwestern Bell suffered a major switch outage that disabled the 911 emergency system in Dallas and some surrounding cities for three hours on Sunday night. However, two day later Ross Ireland, the company’s chief technical officer, was playing up the strength and stability of SBC’s network at the QuEST Forum in Dallas.

“We need standardized processes to be able to achieve ever more difficult common goals,” Ireland said. “The right culture is pride and accountability.”

Ireland also detailed areas of technological interest for SBC. Increasing the provider’s circuit to packet migration is a top priority because of the “almost unlimited bandwidth,” according to Ireland.

“We are working at the edge to make changes closest to end users so customers can touch and feel [the changes],” Ireland said.

So far SBC has 1400 COs in its territory equipped to handle DSL, 2 million miles of fiber and over 6000 neighborhood gateways installed. But SBC isn’t plodding forward with the gateway rollout pace set with the initiation of Project Pronto in part because of regulatory concerns and also in part because of other technologies. Among them are passive optical networking, which may take over many of the gateway deployments.

“We believe optical fiber is where it’s at in the end game,” Ireland said.

The breakthroughs in PON and WDM technologies have drastically reduced cost of those technologies and have boosted their capabilities. Low-cost PON couplers will serve as replacements for the neighborhood gateways, Ireland said.

In addition to interest in DSL, PON and WDM, Ireland also pointed to IP based MPLS as a road map for SBC.

“We are working to migrate to IP MPLS over the next year or so,” Ireland said, adding that the technology does have challenges such as a lack of standards and poor capabilities to link stand alone networks together. “These networks don’t run at five nines and it’s a challenge to make them run at five nines,” he said.

And while Ireland’s talk of interest in several technologies likely had any listening vendors salivating, he repeated what has become the company’s mantra of late—no spending boosts until the RBOC is given regulatory relief from unbundling requirements.

“Until that happens we won’t invest,” he said.