Business without boundaries

Telecommunications Americas, June, 2004 by Sean Buckley

Nortel Networks CTO Greg Mumford is a panelist on "Global Services: Increasing Your Competitive Savvy," a SUPERCOMM plenary panel on Monday, June 21. Sean Buckley sat down with Mumford to discuss Nortel's strategy for success.

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Q: From your perspective, what are this year's SUPERCOMM hot buttons?

A: Nortel's tagline for the show is "business without boundaries." VoIP is clearly ready for prime time, is being deployed, and is the first step toward multimedia and IP. This opens up the new services regime and creates a value in the network we have not had before. I expect that's something people should be interested in, and I think we'll see interest in wireless, which as a technology is moving quickly.

Q: Tell me about this "no boundaries" concept.

A: Our take on the opportunity for communications is to provide productivity enhancements for enterprises and for individuals. When we look at users, there's a real complexity that comes from different appliances delivering services from different networks. The opportunity is to create network sophistication to simplify that user environment. If I am in an enterprise, I have a rich toolset, which I can extend to other buildings of the enterprise, but if I step out onto the public network, I can't get my sophisticated toolset. There's a real boundary between public and private networks. It's got to disappear in order to make the enterprise's productivity toolsets available anywhere. If we want productivity tools, we need multimedia, because that means a lot more information than separate voice, video and data. You can see real boundaries, but the technology is available to improve on this. Hence the tagline--business without boundaries.

Q: What are some of the investments Nortel has made?

A. We believe the communications network has to be capable of multi-service and multimedia and be broadband throughout. That does not mean that every access mechanism has to be broadband, but when you hit something not broadband, what gets delivered is a subset of the user experience. Nortel, for example, has led in the core wireless network by applying the same products to our wireless network that we use in the wireline network. We used our landline services edge to build our GGSN. By doing that, we created a new class of product that integrates the services and the wireless edge. We are now embarked on an investment to have a common core network for wireless and wireline. When you get a common core and the ability for that core network to treat access in an agnostic fashion, you have a delivery vehicle across wireless, wireline and cable.

Q: What are the specific steps and challenges to achieving wireless/wireline integration?

A. We realized that users need mobility and are nomadic, whether they are connected to a wireline or wireless network. There's a construct in the wireless network called the HLR (home location register), and we believe wireline needs the same thing. The voice service set implemented to run on an IP infrastructure needs to be compatible with the voice service set already implemented on the TDM infrastructure. You need them to be compatible so the carrier can start its IP infrastructure investment and stop its TDM investment, and the subscriber sees no difference.

Q: What are the carriers' main pain points?

A: A year ago it would been 'take my cost out' with service as an afterthought, while today its 'give me services at lower cost.' The IP infrastructure should be a lot lower cost than today's different networks for different services. This is the kind of space where you get the user environment unified. You're seeing some carriers react to it. Bell Canada reacted to it by saying: 'that's my services platform and I want to innovate services on top of that.'

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