High-speed access, continued

May 15, 2002 12:00 PM, the Telephony staff

The acceptance of broadband and the deployment of broadband is greatly related to optical, because the connectivity you have on high-speed technologies--whether they are electrical or optical--necessitates the need for optical cores in the metro and long haul for sure. That is very much interrelated.

In my own home I have both DSL and cable. DSL was my primary method of access until I started getting scared by all the DSL providers that were going out of business. What will drive more broadband to the home is not one killer app, but many killer apps. It's the multiplicity of moving from pure voice and telephony to Internet access, voice and video applications.

This is a case where it's not lack of technology or lack of applications that can drive Internet bandwidth. It's translating the availability of technology and applications to the process of making it happen, digging up the trenches and putting in the cable for fiber or even copper where some of the copper lines have to be activated.

The government can be an enabler, but ultimately this is about technology, consumer and carrier being the primary forcing functions of this. You have to have the thoughtful combination of technology and a home for it, which has a business proposition. And that's why voice and circuits prospered so much--they had both a real life application and a business proposition for the carrier.

The trouble with Internet access is we all got used to having it close to free. And it's not a free model. Unfortunately, we swung the pendulum too far in moving from extreme investment in technology and not understanding where they fit to extreme caution on profitability. Some of these things may not be profitable in a year but they may be in three years. It's possible that we are temporarily stifling innovation and emphasizing profitability and business more. I hope this is just a temporary setback, where carriers understand that investing in technology in a thoughtful fashion can still be extremely profitable.

But I think it's also true that during the height of the bubble we did overbuild--we did over-invest in technology. We forgot to do the sanity check in the industry. And maybe now we have recoiled and become super cautious.

That said, call me old-fashioned, but I still like for us to be together interacting as human beings separate from any machine or computer. This is a huge asset-but like everything else in life there has to be balance to it. I don't think it's a substitute for us getting together at the dinner table or reading a good book. It's just hard to tuck that computer in bed. --As told to Liane LaBarba

JanEtte Weber, global communications manager, Vermillion Group/MRI

With more than 400,000 layoffs in the telecom arena since March 2000, one could presume that the broadband evolution is ending. But the opposite is true. It just takes time--time for the industry to beef up its technology before widespread deployment takes place, and time for telecom companies to shore up their balance sheets and wait out the economic storm.

Though the telecom arena has deployed broadband, it has not been widespread. And that's where the opportunity lies.

"We always dream of and conceive of ideas that are great. Then the practical application of technology sometimes takes time to catch up to the concepts," said JanEtte Weber, global communications division manager at the Vermillion Group, an executive search firm and affiliate of Management Recruiters International. "I don't think the average person, including myself, realizes how effective broadband's going to make life and ease up a lot of traveling and shopping and whatever."

Weber believes that from a broadband standpoint, the IP telephony arena has to continue to grow, because the industry does not have all the technology in place to make it work the way it's supposed to. There will be widespread deployment of broadband, but there won't be as huge an uptake as what the industry was seeing eight years ago, she said. "Telecom companies will be smart about their deployment. They will make sure the technology is there so they can get immediate revenue from the deployment. Will it be hot and heavy? No. But it will be a steady up-rise."

Believe it or not, telecom is still hiring, Weber said. Now companies have the ability to choose the best--individuals who not only understand their area of expertise, but the industry as a whole.

"Even though I hate to see companies go out of business, even though I hate to see the employment loss, for those of us in the recruiting business, the only impact that we have felt is that the cream rises to the top," Weber said. "Every person that we put into our broadband companies from here on will need to be pretty diversified in their skill sets to know how to alleviate as many problems as they can." --Amalia D. Parthenios

Rick Rotundo, Director of disruptive technologies, MeshNetworks

As his title suggests, MeshNetworks' director of disruptive technologies Rick Rotundo has no qualms about upsetting the status quo. Luckily for him, he's at a company that decided it would start mostly from scratch when creating its solution for a wireless broadband network.

"We built a mesh network," Rotundo said. "We are not about a better radio, we are about building a wireless Internet." Their mobile broadband solution includes peer-to-peer routing technology, a distributed or mesh-like network architecture.  

To Rotundo, broadband wireless should be synonymous with simplicity. He maintains that broadband wireless should be viewed as access to the network that is equivalent to what people receive via cable, DSL or an office network connection.

"Applications such as Internet e-mail or Instant Messenger are equivalent whether you are dealing with wireline or wireless," he said. "The actual metric of broadband will change. As the network becomes more robust, there will be more streaming applications and the way people use the network will change over time."

Broadband already has transformed the way Rotundo conducts family business. With loved ones spread out all over the country, he has grown to rely on video clips and the pictures he receives via his high-speed connection. "Broadband makes everything a lot more immediate. Even though I'm 2,000 miles away, it has made keeping my family together and in touch much richer."

Once people get a taste of what broadband can do for them, high-speed Internet access will go from being a worldwide wait to a worldwide Web. However, this most likely will kick into high gear first in tech-savvy countries and then with the younger generations, he said.

"This will happen not so much for the older generation. My parents accept dial-up, but for my generation and those who are younger, that is totally unacceptable," he said. "I see broadband really taking off as the younger generations start running households."

Still, mobile broadband solutions are lost on various U.S. carriers, which are strong proponents of the status quo, Rotundo said. The traction is expected to come from Asian, South American and European players.

"Instead of trying to make a solution fit a preconception of what they think a network should look like, those guys overseas are looking for technology that actually will work," he said. "They are not putting their heads in the sand. They know they need to get spectrum to pay for itself, so they say 'Let's look at alternative technologies.' Here, we need broadband first before we even can begin to realize how much we can do with e-mail or the Internet." --Kelly Carroll

Henry Wong, entrepreneur

Henry Wong was into broadband before it was called broadband--before broadband exploded, and way before it came crashing down.

All the way back in the dark ages of 1988, only four years after divestiture and a full eight years before the Telecom Act, Wong started Combinet, a maker of ISDN remote access products. Seven years later, the broadband engine was revving, CLECs were germinating and Combinet was sold off to Cisco Systems in an all-stock deal that netted Combinet's shareholders $114 million in Cisco shares.

At this point in the story, Wong could have gone off to a quiet retirement while all the "punks with purple hair," as he calls them, set up flimsy, VC-enriched broadband-dependent ventures. Instead, Wong took the approach of Levi Strauss, providing the pick axes and shovels to the gold rushers by creating chip set vendor XaQti. The company, which developed chip sets for the gigabit Ethernet market, was eventually bought by Vitesse in 1999.

Wong's next two ventures--CNet Technology, a LAN/WAN switch vendor that is still independent, and IP telephony gateway developer SS8--followed the same pattern: skirting the edges of broadband, not fully dependent on it but aided by its development nonetheless. "The Internet bubble has burst and everybody realized that even though that have the capacity for the future, what matters now is that Wall Street wants you to give them return on equity," said Wong.

While not completely divorced from SS8, where he is still chairman, Wong is putting his greatest effort into his next venture, called Secure Engine. Though he won't reveal the details of Secure Engine's plan, the company will be dedicated to providing security to those using broadband IP connections for advanced applications including voice.

Being on his fifth start-up has bought Wong some leniency that first time entrepreneurs might not have. But the lessons of launching a venture-backed company aren't significantly different in the post-Internet, mid-broadband age.

"A lot of entrepreneurs have a giant vision, but they try to implement the whole vision at the same time. In a restaurant I may be hungry and I may order the whole menu, but I can only eat one thing at a time. If I try to eat everything at once, I'll choke. I have a very controllable ego. Every three years I start a company and harvest some crops." --Vince Vittore

Tony Elliott, co-founder and CEO, SoVerNet

We play up the fact that we're locally owned. Vermonters very much want to support businesses like us. We had a buyout offer a few years ago and we considered it, but we got a lot of negative feedback from customers.

In a rural state like Vermont, there's a lot of small businesses and home businesses that employ maybe five to 10 people. They usually don't have any kind of direct broadband. In that situation, we'll provision five or six voice lines off the integrated access device and give them anywhere from 1.5 Mb/s to 640 kb/s data access, depending on their needs. Maybe we'll keep one analog line in for backup. The best part is that it's inexpensive and we can put all the services on one bill, which is important for the smaller companies.

Ultimately, what we'd like to do is take over every residence phone service when we roll out broadband service to the home. There's a lot of work-at-home people in our area and having a local presence is very important, especially with the new services. Our typical customer may be part of a larger firm, but he chooses to live in Vermont because of the quality of life. There's a lot of engineering firms, Web development firms and technology writers.

I started a wood manufacturing company called Woodstone Co., and we've got an office in the hills in Westminster, Va. with 16 workstations. We've got a T-1 line with voice-over-IP provisioned. My house is a few hundred yards up the hill from the office and I feed off that line. I've got an IAD in the house, where I can split out four voice lines for myself, my wife and my son. My big application is hooking into the central server of the database. I do a lot of software updates from there and manage a couple of servers from home, so the line stays pretty busy. --As told to Vince Vittore