Murray Hill, N.J. -- For all Lucent's voice expertise, the company lacked two things: ATM core switches carriers need to support multiple services; and ultra-fast routers to add intelligence to Lucent's homegrown optical backbone technology.
But by closing the $20 billion Ascend Communications buy last week and announcing intentions to buy startup Nexabit Networks for $900 million the week before, Lucent has plugged gaping in its product line.
The two deals are part of the company's plan to provide IP voice and data equipment for enterprise and carrier networks. Central to that effort is offering support for quality of service (QoS), which is key to supporting voice calls on packet networks.
The Ascend deal buys Lucent IP Navigator, software that maintains QoS levels on IP traffic as it crosses networks based on Ascend frame relay and ATM switches.
"IP QoS is a hot topic, but the service providers out there right now making money off it all run ATM. ATM is the only way to do QoS over the long haul," says Erin Dunn, an analyst with Vertical Systems group in Dedham, Mass.
IP Navigator software will serve Lucent well for years, Dunn says, because it will take that long to develop technology that insures QoS on pure, carrier-grade IP networks.
Some of Ascend's products overlap with Lucent's and they will be weeded out , says Curt Sanford, president of Lucent's new InterNetworking Systems group.
Notably, Lucent's Softswitch will displace Ascend's Signaling Gateway as the equipment to enable existing voice networks to link up with packet-based voice/data networks.
Also, Ascend MAX TNT and Lucent PortMaster access concentrators will be combined in to the next generation of PortMaster devices. The new gear will be compatible with existing TNTs, Lucent says.
While Ascend gear insures QoS, Nexabit's NX64000 router brings intelligence to Lucent's optical backbone hardware. Lucent Wave Star OLS 400G dense wave division multiplexing gear carries massive amounts of bandwidth point to point at the very core of carrier networks. But those networks require terabit routing to sort traffic out at either end.
"Wavelengths carry 10G bit/sec to 40G bit/sec chunks. So a wavelength or two can completely swamp a (current generation) core router. We need bigger routers to route all that optical bandwidth," says Dan Stanzione, Lucent executive vice president and CEO.
Lucent also needed a router to compete against Cisco's next generation GSR router, now in development and said to support terabit speeds, according to Andrew Cray, an analyst with Aberdeen Group in Boston.
"Cisco dominates the core of the Internet entirely. I think (the NX6400) positions Lucent very, very nicely to compete against them," Cray says.
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