Supercomm looks to build on telecom momentum

Supercomm organizers this year hope to build on the telecom revival evident at last year’s conference.

This year’s show will see more significant announcements from key vendors — Cisco, Lucent, Juniper, Sun, Avici, Riverstone Networks and others — as well as important technology demonstrations intended to prove that next-generation services are ready for prime time.

Supercomm 2004 saw sharp hikes in attendance, exhibitors and exhibition space from 2003. Riding that momentum , this year’s show will see exhibitor count and exhibition space up slightly from last year, while attendance is expected to be flat: 30,000 attendees set to peruse the offerings of 667 exhibitors — 67 more than last year — laid out on 309,000 square feet of real estate, up 9,000 from 2004.

On the enterprise business side, the white-hot service is Ethernet as a replacement for leased lines. For consumers, it’s IPTV coming to a fiber near you as telcos and cable companies jockey for your remote.

Infonetics and IDC expect worldwide Ethernet services to grow at a compound annual rate better than 50% over the next four or five years. IDC says it will grow from $3 billion in 2003 to $19 billion in 2007; and Infonetics pegs growth to $22 billion in 2009 from $2.5 billion in 2004.

Ethernet also will be used to carry video into homes as IPTV. Telcos are embarking on multibillion-dollar fiber buildouts to carry high-speed interactive TV into homes. This will necessitate multimillion-dollar investments in Gigabit passive optical network equipment that is Ethernet friendly.

“The two are in many ways related,” says Thomas Nolle, president of consultancy CIMI.  “If the RBOCs could lower the cost of Ethernet substantially by taking advantage of the same infrastructure as is used for IPTV to get the economies of scale, then they could lower the price of Ethernet enough to make it really attractive and still earn as much profit on it as they would have on SONET.”

Market tracker MRG says the number of IPTV subscribers will grow from 2 million in 2004 to 25 million in 2008. While those numbers are not staggering, the revenue opportunity they represent is more impressive: Subscriber revenue of $635 million in 2004 will grow to $7.2 billion in 2008, according to MRG.

Service providers are spending more overall this year, as well. North American service providers’ capital expenditures are projected to increase 5% to $61 billion in 2005, according to Infonetics Research.

Much of the spending is targeted at IP/MPLS routers and Ethernet switches for the Ethernet/IPTV opportunity. Vendors are responding accordingly.

Juniper, for example, plans to introduce a router at Supercomm designed for high-density Ethernet aggregation to deliver multimedia broadband services, such as IPTV, to a large number of subscribers. Scaling from 100G to 320G bit/sec of capacity, the E320 supports up to 128,000 subscribers. Juniper also is rolling out a High-Density Ethernet (HDE) line module that provides eight ports of Gigabit Ethernet per slot and an “ATM plus Ethernet” line module designed to help ease migration from ATM access to next-generation Ethernet access networks.