Convergence divergence, 09/27/99

Error 404--Not Found

From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 403 (Forbidden) can be used instead. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.

Error 404--Not Found

From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

Network World, 09/27/99

Network equipment vendors have begun dishing up quite a repast of convergence products, but they are really only nibbling at it themselves. Before they take the big bite, it seems, most network vendors are waiting for enterprise-class Internet-based PBXs to emerge and for existing PBXs to depreciate.

"We are constrained the same way our customers are," says Karyn Mashima, chief technical officer and vice president of strategy for Lucent's business communications systems group.

Lucent is implementing convergence selectively on its enterprise backbone to contain costs, create distributed call centers and facilitate catalog operations. But it has not deployed any of the IP phone and iPBX products it has scheduled for release later this year.

Desktop users still have traditional phones, but most of them - 98% by year-end - will have access to an IP-telephony gateway that will let them send voice mail and faxes without making a long-distance call. The company anticipates a 5% reduction in voice costs.

Mitel, the first major PBX vendor to endorse IP-based telephony openly, announced its "voice-LAN" strategy four years ago. But like Lucent, the Kanata, Ont., company is not yet using a converged network on the LAN side. However, Mitel will be the primary alpha site for its first IP telephony products, which include a line of IP phones scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2000. An enterprise-class iPBX will follow about a year later.

Nortel, which expects to bring an enterprise-class iPBX to market by mid-2000, shipped its Integrated IP Trunk Gateway this April. It plugs into Nortel's traditional PBXes, and all the intracompany calls coming from the 1,000 employees at the development site in Santa Clara, Calif., go through it.

Traditional data vendors, on the other hand, are embracing IP phones and LAN-based telephony enthusiastically. For one, 3Com is converting branch offices to converged networks in the wake of its acquisition of iPBX specialist NBX last March.

"We have 25 3Com offices living on our NBX 100 system, and we have 800 customers using it at a total of 12,000 nodes," says Don Hausman, product manager of 3Com's voice solutions group. But, he adds, replacement of enterprise-level PBXes is a different matter because they "have a book value of five years."

For its part, Cisco has some 2,000 of its 20,657 employees on IP phones and expects to increase this number to 3,000 by year-end. Some sites have nothing but a converged net for voice and data.

"Our entire San Jose campus [9,945 employees] will be running on IP telephony by the end of 2000," says Peter Alexander, vice president of marketing at Cisco. As a measure of its confidence in the technology, Cisco converted its vice presidents and customer briefing centers first.

Related links

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