Supercomm to Reflect Telecom Industry Revival
First Chicago show will feature flurry of product announcements
Last year, things started looking better . . . this year, they are better.
Supercomm, the telecom industry’s biggest party kicks off this week at its new Chicago digs with upbeat news: Paid attendance, exhibitor count and square footage of exhibition space are all up from last year, show officials report. This is an indication that a market recovery is in full swing. The show also is expected to include significant announcements from key vendors – Lucent, Movaz Networks, Mahi Networks and Mangrove Systems among them.
Organizers expect 30,000 attendees – 20% more than last year, Supercomm’s swan song in Atlanta after six years. There will be 100 more exhibitors at this year’s show, 600 total; and 300,000 square feet of exhibition space, 22,000 more than 2003.
Slowing declines
The drop-off in global carrier spending is leveling off.
That’s because carriers are picking up and spending again on equipment to offer new services to companies while decreasing their own operating expenses.
North American telecom service providers’ overall capital spending experienced a year-over-year increase in the first quarter of 2004, the first in nearly three years, according to research firm RHK. Worldwide, service provider capital expenditures will remain roughly stable through the next five years, the firm found.
“This is a positive development for the industry, which has seen significant declines in spending in recent years,” RHK said. Global capital spending declined 11% in 2003, to $214 billion, after a nearly 30% decline the year before.
North American capital expenditures also are stabilizing, according to Infonetics Research. Carriers will spend $47.4 billion this year, which is down 2% from 2003. RHK says North American capital spending rose 12% in the first quarter of 2004 compared with the first quarter of 2003.
The hottest area of investment is in equipment for wireless infrastructure and services, both firms found. In North America, capital spending for wireless rose 33% in the first quarter as wireless subscriber numbers increased rapidly Wireline spending declined slightly in the first quarter.
That’s not to say wireline is in a slump. Many wireline RFPs are on the street – such as AT&T’s multiservice edge, SBC’s optical add/ drop multiplexer and switch, and Verizon’s ATM/multiservice core projects.
With that, many vendors plan to unveil and demonstrate new gear designed to appeal to these specific and more general requirements of carriers that want to roll out next-generation telecom services to corporations.
Lucent is expected to announce a metropolitan optical system, the Metropolis Wavelength Services Manager (WSM), designed to help service providers deliver optical bandwidth to their customers’ premises for metropolitan-access, interoffice and regional applications. T-Com, the fixed-network division of Deutsche Telekom, will start testing the dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) system this summer, sources say.
Lucent confirmed it will be making a DWDM announcement at Supercomm but provided no details. Lucent and Movaz jointly developed WSM.
Movaz will unveil a reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) designed to “remotely and instantly” provision services through click-through adding and dropping of circuits. The so- called RAYROADM will help carriers by eliminating manual provisioning and reducing the number of devices they have to manage and maintain, Movaz says.
Mahi Networks plans to unveil another ROADM, which it acquired from the bankrupt Photuris. Mahi’s Vx7 ROADM, combined with its Mi7 metropolitan core aggregation system, will help carriers and cable companies provision new data and wavelength services to businesses, the company says.
Start-up Mangrove will unveil its line of metropolitan Multi- protocol Label Switching (MPLS) gear designed to make more efficient use of carrier metropolitan fiber rings.
Mangrove’s Piranha 100 and 600 access boxes convert legacy services, such as frame relay, ATM and TDM, to MPLS packets at customer sites. This enables more efficient packing of traffic onto SONET networks, the company says. The company will demonstrate these two products and a prototype of its grooming box, called Barracuda.
Equipment to provision video services also will be prevalent. Radvision and Kasenna will announce products running on Intel’s implementation of the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (AdvancedTCA), a new specification from the PCI Manufacturers Group targeting carrier-grade equipment.
Both Radvision and Kasenna have ported their media server and video delivery software to Intel blades that run in an AdvancedTCA- compliant chassis. A carrier running an AdvancedTCA chassis could have blades dedicated to on-demand streaming video delivery and others dedicated to telephony and conferencing applications in the same chassis.
More online!
Get the inside scoop from Senior Editor Phil Hochmuth on how convergence will affect you with our IT Briefing Webcast.
DocFinder: 1530
Copyright Network World Inc. Jun 21, 2004