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Thursday, 29 November 2007 |
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Telcordia annual industry fest identifies speed as one of keys to telecoms future…
It’s all about the speed, stupid. So argued one of the customer panels at this year’s industry rune reading fest organised by OSS/BSS leader Telcordia Technologies.
Speaking at the 2007 event – dubbed E5 this time around and held in San Francisco – Pieter Poll, cto of US operator Qwest, kicked off the speed ball, so to speak, with the revelation that his company had recently selected a vendor to overlay its long haul fibre optic network on the basis of fast delivery rather than price. “We` didn’t choose that supplier because it happened to be lower cost,” said Poll, adding that the supplier got the gig because Qwest believed the vendor offered the best technology that could be delivered in the shortest time. “The drivers now are speed, speed and speed,” he observed.
But in the telecommunications business speed can take some quite different forms. Speed of successful IPTV customer service activation was a theme explored by Nicki Palmer, vice president Network Operations Support at Verizon Wireless.
Then there’s the ‘hard core’: access speed. According to Poll, half of Qwest’s potential customer base can currently get from 3Mbits/s to 7Mbits/s, the rest around 1.5Mbits/s. But, as Dennis Tilley, Telcordia president of Operations & Tansformation Solutions, later observed, 1.5Mbits/s is probably the equivalent of tomorrow’s dial-up. Acknowledging that the rates he described were ‘interesting’ from the perspective of today’s broadband landscape, Poll predicted 20Mbits/s to 40Mbits/s would be needed in the future.
We say: phew!
John Williamson in San Francisco
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