SuperComm to highlight carrier-customer edge

ATLANTA - SuperComm 2000 this week will feature new gear that lets service providers offer streamlined packages of network services to users.

Key among the new equipment are switches that handle voice and data, making it less expensive and faster for service providers to provision new services. Customers of such providers wind up with more flexible voice, video, data and Internet services that they can buy from a single carrier.

Newcomers Oresis Communications and Telica as well as veteran player General DataComm (GDC) will wheel out switching that will let upstart carriers jump into local markets and give established local carriers tools to migrate to cheaper, more efficient nets.

Telica will announce a plan to package its multiservice switches with Redback Networks' gear, which manages the services customers buy from service providers. That combination will enable voice and data services to be delivered over a single line, and traffic to be sorted at the edge of the carrier network and switched into carrier voice or data backbones.

Oresis will unveil its first product, the Isis-700 Integrated OmniService switch, which the company says will cut carrier edge-switch costs in half and reduce provisioning times for new services to hours rather than weeks. Oresis will then demonstrate the Isis-700 simultaneously handling voice and video circuits, as well as frame relay, ATM and IP traffic.

GDC will announce that it is teaming with start-up Taqua Systems to enable voice, video and data switching using GDC's NexEra packet voice and data gateways to take packet traffic and translate it into traditional voice traffic. Taqua's Open Compact Exchange local access switch would then route the voice traffic toward traditional voice networks.

Tellabs also will introduce a new line of switches that can handle local traffic or trunking between carrier offices.

Carrier Broadwing will introduce local voice services that it will support using switches located hundreds of miles from the customer. Customers will be able to buy bundles of local and long-distance voice services as well as data and Internet access. Rather than installing local phone switches in each city where it offers service, the carrier will use a switch extension that draws some of its features from a complete local switch in Cincinnati, the company says. That architecture saves money.

Also making a move on local services networks is net.com, previously N.E.T., to go with its new mission: building service-creation equipment for broadband networks.

The company's gear will enable carriers to add content, such as network-based applications, to broadband access services. It will introduce its first new product since its name change. That device, Scream200, is a hardware platform to support voice over DSL. N.E.T. started out as a leader in T-1 multiplexers, then made a slow shift into ATM before remaking itself yet again last month into a broadband service creation company.

Contact Senior Editor Tim Greene

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