One-time Tellabs CEO hopeful tackles IP QOS.

Break time is over for Ed Kennedy.

The former president of Tellabs’ North America division, who was once considered a likely candidate to become Tellabs’ chief executive, is now leading a new telecom equipment start-up.

Kennedy is currently CEO of five-year-old Rivulet Communications, according to the company’s Web site.

With a $20 million funding round last March, Rivulet aims to enable quality of service in IP networks, using algorithms to coordinate routers in a way that eliminates packet loss.

Kennedy left Tellabs four years ago, as the vendor was searching for a new CEO. (It eventually settled on Krish Prabhu, who recently announced his resignation.) At the time, Kennedy said working for the Naperville, Ill., company and meeting with its customers across the country left him too often apart from his family in Washington, D.C. (Rivulet’s headquarters is located in nearby Herndon, Va.)

He wanted “a break,” he said in 2004. Since then, Kennedy has served as an advisor for venture capital firm Columbia Capital and as a director for Hatteras Networks, Imagine Communications and Visual Networks.

The new CEO job isn’t Kennedy’s first. The Alcatel veteran came to Tellabs through its 2001 acquisition of data networking vendor Ocular Networks, where he was CEO.

(Listen to a podcast with Rivulet's Ed Kennedy.)