Telecom Industry on The Mend In Chicago
Activity At Supercomm Highlights A Slow Recovery, Multiple
Technologies Vying For Access Markets
by Lee H. Goldberg
Greetings From Chicago, a city whose numerous steak houses make it North America's destination city for devout carnivores, and this year's host of Supercomm. While this pan-industry extravaganza has not regained the traffic volumes or lavish excesses seen in the pre-2001 telecom boom days, the crowds have returned, and seem to be ready to buy the elements of tomorrow's networks. Meanwhile, several important technologies have emerged from the ashes and have the potential to help service providers build the infrastructure for delivering data, voice, video and other services that could tease additional revenue out of business and residential customers.
SONET Revival
The past year's evolution of Ethernet-over-SONET (EoS) technologies has been dramatic, yielding equipment that will enable carriers to inexpensively dispense precise slivers of bandwidth to their customers, often without the painful manual provisioning required in earlier networks. This in good part thanks to new silicon that supports efficient encapsulation and link management techniques, such as virtual concatenation (VCAT) and the Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS) which the once-cumbersome transport SONET/SDH protocols to carry IP traffic with greatly improved efficiency and granularity. Thanks to silicon from the likes of Agere, Mindspeed, Parama, PMC-Sierra, TranSwitch and Vitesse, the show floor was heavily populated with EoS-capable ADMs, MSPPs, and other advanced metro access gear.
Access Rivalry: xDSL Vs. PONs
But even those of us not lucky enough to rate a SONET drop in our home or office,can still look forward to much-improved bandwidth as ADSL2+ and VDSL silicon becomes more abundant, and more mature. As this week's product news attests, a wide variety of players including Atmel, Centillium, Conexant, and STMicro have all announced their ADSL2+ chip sets at Supercomm. With greater reach, enhanced line diagnostics, and up to 24 Mbit/s worth of downstream bandwidth, these devices will enable service providers to upgrade their existing DSLAMs to deliver video and derived voice services while still maintaining broadband data connections. And if you're a real bandwidth hog, Aware's pair bonding technique will allow you to double your capacity using the second wire pair found in the wire drops coming into most North American homes.
Meanwhile,
VDSL chip makers Metalink and Ikanos are touting their latest solutions
which deliver up to 100-Mbit/s over short (3000 feet or less) runs, but
also support runs up to 28 kft with line rates equal to, or better than
ADSL. While not quite standardized or interoperable with other vendors yet,
these technologies have found many commercial applications for multi-service
distribution in fiber-to-the-neighborhood, and fiber-to-the building applications
(See Fig.1).
And is if that was not enough competition for the access space, Supercomm
was host to several passive optical network (PON) component vendors who
are beginning to make their first serious efforts at acquiring a slice of
the action. While probably not cost-effective in neighborhoods, the new
BPON/EPON chip sets from the likes of Centillium, Motorola, Passavé,
and others are packing low BOMs that rival the cost of a copper solution
in so-called "greenfield" installations. 
With PONs already being aggressively deployed in Japan, and SBC
committed to a multi-billion dollar optical build-out over the next two
years, it looks like there will be a whole lot of fiber reaching out to
homes and offices in the near future. And if you don't believe me, Passavé's
recent order for 500 k CPE chip sets (see Fig. 2) and the CO-side silicon to drive them (See Fig. 3) should convince any reasonable
soul that PONs are a real contender for access dollars.
ATCA Everywhere
But while there was lots of competition between access technologies,
there was a surprisingly near-unanimous agreement about the box that would
house them as the Advanced TCA specification stood out as one of the most
influential technologies at the show. 
One
could not go more than a few feet down the show floor without bumping into
a product that either fit into, or supported the ATCA form chassis and electrical
standard. One of the liveliest areas in the McCormick Center's hall was
the enclave of chassis, board, component, and software vendors who populated
the ATCA Showcase area. Visitors got to see an ATCA platform functioning
as a Central Office IP-PBX running high-demand applications, as well as
a multi-vendor cluster server in full-up operation (See Fig. 4).
Although the large glut of surplus networking equipment that still haunts the market from 2001/2002 may continue to slow the demand for new products a bit, the economies of scale, multi-vendor interoperability and high density that ATCA offers should help relegate much of this older networking iron to lower-tier applications more quickly than expected. The standard's extremely scalable architecture, inherent flexibility, and emphasis on reliability and interoperability may help usher in a new phase in networking equipment design that's somewhat akin to what the generic PC did to personal computing equipment. While mass-deployment of ATCA-based products is still a year or two off, the abundance of support for the standard was overwhelming. I can hardly wait until next year's Supercomm to see how far ATCA has penetrated the industry, and its design practices.
Comments? Questions? Ideas for the next "big thing" in networking? Write me at: lgoldberg@green-electronics.com.