Fiber coming for your broadband diet

In what could break the logjam of curtailed spending in the telecom industry, three RBOCs last week said they are defining common technical specifications for fiber deployments to businesses and residences. The Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) specs agreed to by Verizon, SBC and BellSouth, and subsequent RFP, are intended to reduce the cost of implementing fiber and fiber equipment in the local loop for delivery of high-bandwidth broadband services. The lower costs should spur volume purchases – up to 1 million PON and other optical units are expected from the RFP, which will be issued in mid-June – which will have a ripple effect through the vendor and supplier chains. It should also reduce line costs from the $1,300 to $1,500 range, down to the $700 and $800 range, analysts say. That should spur demand for services and new fiber deployments among consumers and enterprises. The joint RFP is similar to the DSL specs agreed to in 1996 that drastically lowered prices on DSL equipment and services. http://www.nwfusion.com/edge/news/2003/0529fttp.html

In what could break the logjam of curtailed spending in the telecom industry, three RBOCs last week said they are defining common technical specifications for fiber deployments to businesses and residences. The Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) specs agreed to by Verizon, SBC and BellSouth, and subsequent RFP, are intended to reduce the cost of implementing fiber and fiber equipment in the local loop for delivery of high-bandwidth broadband services. The lower costs should spur volume purchases – up to 1 million PON and other optical units are expected from the RFP, which will be issued in mid-June – which will have a ripple effect through the vendor and supplier chains. It should also reduce line costs from the $1,300 to $1,500 range, down to the $700 and $800 range, analysts say. That should spur demand for services and new fiber deployments among consumers and enterprises. The joint RFP is similar to the DSL specs agreed to in 1996 that drastically lowered prices on DSL equipment and services.

https://www.nwfusion.com/edge/news/2003/0529fttp.html

In the latest installment of “O Big Brother, Where Art Thou?” we have four-year-old Laurel Networks chumming around with the much older Marconi. Marconi will OEM Laurel’s ST200 edge router and sell it as part of a multiservice IP/optical system to the U.S. federal government. Marconi fills a product gap, Laurel gets credibility, blah, blah, blah… The only caveat according to one analyst is that Marconi didn’t put any skin into the deal. That may make some customers think twice about how really strong this relationship is compared to others: Alcatel buying TiMetra, Tellabs buying Vivace, Ciena buying WaveSmith…

https://www.nwfusion.com/edge/news/2003/0529marconi.html

Anybody buying Equipe? Ciena did invest a reported $5 million into the ATM/MPLS core switch start-up but ended up buying edge switch maker WaveSmith. In the meantime, Equipe Communications has been cutting staff in light of no revenue and shrinking capital. Workforce is less than half of what it was two years ago. And the appetite for multiservice core switches appears to have been satiated by multiservice core routers. Analysts say Equipe better find a buyer soon – for its product, its company or both – or it’s au revoir for this once promising start-up.

https://www.nwfusion.com/edge/news/2003/0527equipe.html