Alcatel, Lucent gear on 'collision course'

At the Globalcomm trade show in June, Alcatel and Lucent Technologies both introduced products to help carriers migrate from circuit to packet-based transport, but the two vendors may well find that there is only room for one of those products after the merger they hope to close this year.

At Globalcomm, Alcatel introduced its 1850 Transport Service Switch to North America as a more flexible alternative to Sonet multiservice provisioning platforms. Rather than force carriers to map packet traffic over Sonet, the 100-Gb/s 1850 has a universal switch fabric that can be partitioned to provide whatever mix of Sonet and packet traffic carriers desire.

The same week, Lucent was echoing some of the same notions of flexibility and packet migration as it unveiled its new Universal Packet Mux, a converged optical/packet-based transport platform that supports time-division and wavelength-division multiplexing as well as packet traffic. Using 40-Gb/s interfaces, the UPM has a total wire-speed packet-switching capacity of 280 Gb/s.

"Those two products are on a direct collision course," said Eve Griliches, IDC research manager.

Neither company will comment in detail about differences between the two products or speculate about post-merger product strategy.

Because Alcatel's 1850 had a head start--the SDH-based version has been sold outside the U.S. for about a year and has reportedly sold well in Europe--more analysts predict it will eclipse Lucent's UPM after the merger. The UPM will be available for testing this fall but won't be generally available until next year. Back in June, Alcatel said six customers were already trialing the 1850 in North America.

The UPM/1850 overlap is just one of the many the two companies will face if their merger closes this year as planned, said Joe Chiasson, Susquehanna Financial Group analyst. "It's a microcosm of the whole situation on the wireline side. Unwinding these product overlaps, assets will have to be rationalized."