All together now: the IAD is coming

Communications News, Jan, 1998 by Ripley Hotch

Integrated access devices, multifunction boxes -- whatever you want to call them -- have a real fascination for network managers. An IAD combines voice, video, and data, and transports them to another IAD over a single high-capacity circuit. These devices have the potential of organizing all that spaghetti of routers and s that drives WAN managers nuts.

Judging from conversations over the last few months, IADs are coming into their own.

"Companies that have a metropolitan campus are interested in integrated access," says Tom Slykhouse, director of product marketing for Bay Network's switching product line. Bay's newest switches handle voice, video, "Customers have been asking for it for the last four to six months. Any way to save money by integrating everything into a single service provider pipe is beneficial."

Premisys Communications recent startup Vina Technologies (both companies are in Fremont, Calif.) are providing IADs for parts of the market that have never been real possibilities before. Premisys has come out with what Joseph Lias, its vice president of marketing, calls an "integrated bandwidth optimizer" (yes, we do need more new terminology). The idea is that companies that are not Fortune 100 in size but are in what Lias calls "the Forgotten 500,000" can take advantage of partial T1 or T3 or OC3, according to need. Lias even thinks that building managers could become local service providers for their tenants.

Vina is interested in the mid-sized and small business market that wants to integrate local calling into its T1 access. If you can do that, T1s become much more affordable to companies that never would have considered one before. Vina calls its device a "T1 integrator." It combines an IP/IPX router, CSU/DSU, FRAD, firewall, DHCP server, and does local call routing -- a sort of kitchen sink for the small operation. The carrier DACS pulls in voice and Internet traffic, pipes it over the T1 with 1-24 voice lines and 64 Kbps-1.5 Mbps data line. The IAD divides it to send the network traffic to the LAN and the voice to the telephone key system or PBX. And the price is in the $6,000 range.

Tom Barsi, Vina's director of marketing, says this device will allow smaller operations to take advantage of the growing number of carriers, and to get better prices for T1 access, without having to change out the PBX or key system they now use. These are large promises. "Our biggest challenge is that voice and data people have always been separate, and bringing them together is hard," Barsi says. This sounds familiar.

Both Premisys and Vina currently sell through carriers, but they are offering capabilities that network managers at all sizes of companies should find intriguing. You can think about shopping around among the carriers and service providers to get services that once took a host of devices and what seemed to be a legion of staff to install and manage.

There is a drawback to IADs, of course. Since they are combining so many functions, if you get a different capability or standard for one of those functions, the whole device will have to be replaced. You can't just go in (at least at this point) and change out the (relatively inexpensive) CSU/DSU.

In the end, though, there are forces driving this combination. "The rationale to bring a CSU/DSU into a router or a DACs is driven by space in the data centers that it occupies," says Jesse Price, vice president of Eastern Research, an access device manufacturer in Moorestown, N.J. "Another part of the integration that's positive is that the network manager eliminates a two-vendor solution, plus the cable that was required to connect the two vendors or devices together."

When you start combining voice and data, that saves a lot of finger pointing. The bottom line, Price says, is that integrated access is "the biggest thing we've seen happen in the market."