Nortel's vision: Wireless everywhere and PBXs embedded in servers

By Adam Gaffin
Network World Fusion, 10/21/98

Atlanta - Dave House is annoyed that he can't move his phone from his desk to his table.

He could probably just buy a longer cord. But House, president of Nortel Networks, says he will wait for the new unified network in which users - and their phones and network devices - will be able to roam anywhere.

House and Nortel CEO John Roth discussed what they saw as the coming network in a keynote at NetWorld+Interop today.

A key to the new network will be the integration of current voice technologies and protocols, such as SS7, with the IP network, they said. Next year, Nortel will ship a line of NT servers that support such traditional PBX services.

This alone will free up users to design innovative new applications that can access voice switching services as easily as they now tap relational databases, they said.

"The phone system becomes sort of a peripheral in this sort of environment," Roth said.

Vital to this move is porting over voice's "seven 9s" reliability. Roth said Nortel's own internal IP network currently averages 99.8% uptime, but even that is not good enough.

"If you're running voice over your LAN and your LAN goes down, how're you gonna call your help desk?" House asked.

However, moving everything to IP will not be easy and will take several years, because it will require porting over hundreds of functions now handled by such PBXs as Nortel's Meridian 1, they said.

"You can't change the way it operates,'' he said. "People are already trained on which buttons to push.''

Roth said that PBX runs on 4 million lines of code. "You've got to take that capability with you,'' Roth said. "You can't put a million programmers and put them on it for a year or two.''

In the interim, vendors such as Nortel will increasingly add IP services to PBXs, to help ease the transition, he said.

At the same time, Roth said carriers and vendors will try to solve a major bottleneck on the public network today: "the last mile" between the central office and home users and offices. Roth said users accustomed to speedy data access on the corporate LAN increasingly want the same sort of speed at home. Carriers face a big challenge: Cable modems are proving immensely popular, but much of their own copper wire needs expensive upgrades to handle such features as ADSL, he said.

Roth and House also predicted that wireless will become a key part of this global network. Already, Roth said, there is enough wireless bandwidth to carry all of today's PSTN voice traffic. But he predicted wireless networks will become more important for data - he predicted that within a few years, 70% of wireless traffic will consist of data, compared to just 2% today.

And wireless prices will move downward, to as little as 4 cents a minute, he said.

House said the newly ubiquitous and inexpensive wireless coverage will let companies develop personal profiles for their users, defining how and where to route different types of traffic at different times.

"Why should I have a wire on any phone?'' House asked. "I'd like to be able to get in the back seat of a cab and open up my notebook and still be on the LAN.''

And move his desk phone to his table.