Imagine unafraid
By: By Ed Gubbins
"Imagine the BT experience in the U.S. or in Asia," Daryl Dunbar, director of British Telecom's 21st Century Network initiative, told attendees of a panel discussion at the NXTcomm trade show last month...
NXTcomm, Day One
By: By Ed Gubbins
On the first day of NXTComm, it’s surprising to see how much activity there is among exhibitors at the show. In years past, vendors without new gear to tout at the industry’s big summer show might have trumpeted customer wins or future strategy directions. But this year, there’s a surprising amount of new products on the floor. It’s almost easier to name the vendors that aren’t unveiling new gear at the show (or shortly before it)....
The core router race
By: By Ed Gubbins
While describing Juniper Networks’ new core router this week, Shailesh Shukla, the vendor’s vice president of service provider marketing and partnerships, said two things to me that I can’t reconcile...
Table steaks
By: By Ed Gubbins
I remember vividly the time I had lunch with Alltel chief executive officer Scott Ford. It was in a small private dining room down the hall from his 12th-floor office in Little Rock. We were served heaping piles of barbecued meat impossible to eat in one sitting. It was September 2001. At the time, Alltel was trying to pressure another rural telco, CenturyTel, to merge with it. I was trying to eat and take notes at the same time....
Nortel ready to dance
By: By Ed Gubbins
When Alcatel and Lucent Technologies announced their betrothal a year ago, analysts and prognosticators began talking much more seriously about which vendors would best be paired with which in the pending consolidation crush...
Trust
By: By Ed Gubbins
The ongoing saga of antitrust litigation has been fascinating to me since I first wrote at length about the crusade in 2002. (Despite its age, that story is well worth reading if you haven’t yet; it’s like the thriller John Grisham would have written if, instead of becoming a lawyer, he’d have been a public utility commissioner.)...
Slinging speed
By: By Ed Gubbins
If you haven’t listened to the podcast of my recent interview with Cogent Communications CEO Dave Schaeffer, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. In it, our hero is forced to confront his “dark” side—that is, the areas of Cogent’s footprint not yet connected to its fiber optic network...
Copperheads
By: By Ed Gubbins
As Ethernet provider Cogent Communications vows to double the pace at which it brings its fiber network to new buildings, it seems as though everyone and his brother is focused on Ethernet over copper...
The wordsmith
By: By Ed Gubbins
In any earnings season, only one company’s quarterly conference call causes me actual physical pain: that of Juniper Networks. I try to transcribe all the calls in a rough shorthand as I listen, and Juniper’s chief executive officer, Scott Kriens...
Getting the drop on fiber
By: By Ed Gubbins
In a recent article about cost declines in fiber-to-the-premises deployment, I wrote about how pre-connectorized fiber drops (the fiber that meets the house) helped Verizon Communications bring down deployment costs...
Don't call it a comeback
By: By Ed Gubbins
Someone once accused my wife of being a glass-half-empty type of person, to which she replied, "No, I'm actually a glass-half-full person. But it's that other half that I'm worried about"...
The Italian Job
By: By Tim McElligott
Ed Whitacre's ambitions know no bounds. Nothing wrong with that. But his decision to make some grand statement by taking on the name AT&T may come back to bite him in the AS&S now that he wants to become a major shareholder in Telecom Italia...
The ROADM space
By: By Ed Gubbins
At this year’s Optical Fiber Communications conference, like many before it, there was a lot of talk about reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs)...
Taking questions
By: By Ed Gubbins
I seldom get through a week without being asked the same two recurring questions: “How much bandwidth will be enough for residential triple-play subscribers?” and “What in the world has happened to our marriage?”...
Who needs a COO?
By: By Ed Gubbins
Who needs a chief operating officer? The thought crossed my mind as I noticed that Actelis Networks just named a new COO. Another Ethernet equipment vendor, Extreme Networks, recently eliminated the position...
The PBT Race
By: By Ed Gubbins
Provider Backbone Transport (PBT) has come a long way since last summer, when Nortel Networks announced its embrace of the point-to-point technology as a simpler, cheaper alternative to MPLS in metro networks...
Cisco, just buy Calix already
By: By Ed Gubbins
Isn't it time for Cisco Systems to just go ahead and acquire Calix? Industry prognosticators have been speculating about this combination for at least...
Delivering the digital lifestyle
By: By Heather Kirksey
As more providers introduce triple-play services, interoperability is becoming the true differentiator. Read the latest installment of our quarterly series on standards, by Heather Kirksey, member of the DSL Forum’s Board of Directors...
Bowling alone nonsense
By: By Ed Gubbins
The distinctive effect of technology has been to enable us to get entertainment and information while remaining entirely alone, Robert Putnam, a public...
Network Neutrality
By: By Carol Wilson
The contrast couldn't have been more stark at one end of the U.S., the high-tech industry was showing off everything that can come to the American home...
Satellite's time has come
By: By Andrew Cole
The much-maligned commercial satellite space is experiencing an awakening with the advent of ancillary terrestrial component, or ATC, service players...
M&A arms race
By: By Ed Gubbins
Following a slew of acquisitions from Cisco Systems and Motorola in recent months, the acquisition of Tandberg Television proposed this week by Arris would set up a three-way race for the residential triple-play...
Stomach check
By: By Ed Gubbins
Do you have the stomach thing or the throat thing? Or both? Everyone I know has either just gotten rid of one of those illnesses or is still trying to kick it. People on opposite ends of North America have complained to me...
Wishing for certainty
By: By Dan O'Shea
You know things are getting pretty tough out there when you see more than 20 vendors band together to urge the Federal Communications Communication to speed up its approval ...
Long December
By: By Ed Gubbins
Are you nervously eyeing the calendar, fretting over the quickly shrinking number of days left to shop for Christmas presents or finish other 2006 projects before the year ends?...
