SBC Communications is talking with vendors about new outside plant technology that could help the company begin the process of consolidating Central Offices and retiring some legacy switches.

Chris Rice, executive vice president of network planning & engineering and CTO of SBC, initially mentioned the initiative during a panel discussion of CTOs at Telecom ’05 Monday evening.

In an interview Tuesday, Rice elaborated on the plan to drive further costs out of service provisioning by deploying cross-connect capability at the service area interface (SAI).

“We are getting IPTV out there for Lightspeed and we are doing VoIP based on IMS,” he said. “Those are the key items that we are going to be exploring. VoIP is cheaper to offer, if you take the TDM gear out. Broadband takes out a lot of the costs, but we still roll a truck to connect you to Lightspeed.”

What SBC and Rice are seeking is distributed cross-connect capability that allows customers to be remotely provisioned, but that is only the first step in trimming the remaining TDM architecture. The next step is to begin consolidating existing wire centers and consolidating Class 5 switches onto a smaller footprint, Rice said.

“We have IP in the backhaul network and with ROADMs, we are taking IP/optical into the metro network,” he commented. “The last piece is the [distribution network].”

Eventually, as more customer voice service is provided by VoIP, SBC and other telephone companies will terminate TDM traffic at the SAI, and carry it as VoIP into the network, gaining greater efficiencies from consolidating onto IP.

“We have talked about what the concepts are with our vendors but we are still finalizing detailed requirements,” Rice said. SBC will work with its existing Lightspeed vendors on that portion of its network but will look for other vendors to address the part of the network not being upgraded to fiber-to-the-node within the first three-year phase of Lightspeed.

There are equipment vendors offering this capability today, said Ron Westfall, analyst with Current Analysis. Critical Telecom’s Gemini platform, which it sells in partnership with Ericsson, is one option, he said. Calix Networks also offers that capability in its ODC-20 and ODC-40 products, which are 240-line and 480-line products respectively, said Kevin Walsh, director of marketing.

“It’s an option we’ve always had,” he commented. “The goal is to put all the work in up front and never have to revisit the site.”