Changing the network's core

Communications News, April, 1998 by Ripley Hotch

Although Viren has some concerns about the scalability of the e-Net technology, he thinks that it--or something like it--offers a great deal to CLECs as well as enterprises.

"This whole market will break loose sometime next year," he says. "Look what happened when technology allowed us to wed the modem and the router into Ascend's and US Robotics' boxes-for $35,000, you could become an ISP overnight. That whole market exploded. Rob's company and others are bringing out low-cost data-based telephony--which will push costs way down below the PBX requirement. People can become CLECs for a lot less investment."

To deal with the problem of scalabilitY, Veschi has signed on for a partnership with Summa Four, Inc., a provider of standards-based programmable switching platforms, to create a carrier-class voice-over-IP gateway.

When they announced the agreement, both companies cited studies that predicted the IP voice gateway field to grow to a $1.8 billion market by the year 2001.

The gateway will combine cards containing up to 32 Texas Instruments digital signal processors with controller cards that support up to 16 T1/E1 spans, to scale up to more than 1,000 simultaneous calls in a single-shelf, carrier-certified chassis.

"We're concentrating on the high end and the low end of the market," says Veschi with a laugh.

Unlike some other manufacturers, e-Net is willing to send out starter kits (at $1,695 each). Veschi refers to it as "seeding" markets, and inquiries have ranged from the SOHO market to international carriers.

"It is an educational sell today," Veschi says. "The marketplace is becoming much more educated on this technology much more swiftly than any I've ever seen. We've gone from people walking in the door saying `What is it, I don't understand, why do I care,' to people coming directly to the booth [at a trade show], looking for us, saying `Hey, I understand you guys have this, and how are you guys different.' People are taking the time to get educated because it does offer such a huge advantage to them that they can crack the quality of service issue."

Given Veschi's history in network management, it isn't surprising that he thinks of e-Net's products as a way to ease that problem. When he was selling the products, he says, he saw that the telecomm and datacomm managers had the same problems.

"When we sat down and started talking about all the various aspects of integration of voice and data into a single ubiquitous infrastructure and the management thereof, we could see that obviously it would become a much more critical infrastructure if all of your corporate assets resided on it," he says.

"The customer is already spending the and the money we're talking about spending on of the voice today. If they transfer that investment over to building a more robust management infrastructure, over a period of time they end up saving a lot of money."

That's where he thinks that network managers have a great deal to gain. Merging the networks offers a simplified and more cost-effective structure that allows managers to save their organizations a lot of money.