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Americas Issue: September 2004
Offline
Mukesh Chatter
CEO and President, Axiowave Networks
by Ted McKenna
Say there are three lines of people waiting to check in at an airline counter: first class, business class and coach. Just because everyone gets sorted into the proper line doesn’t mean they get the level of service they’ve paid for; it all depends on who’s actually behind the counter. Telecom service providers face the same problem in providing class of service, notes Mukesh Chatter, co-founder, CEO and president of Marlborough, Mass.-based Axiowave Networks.
The inexorable push to run traffic over IP/MPLS-based networks, moreover, as opposed to ATM and frame relay, only makes the problem more difficult, despite the notion that IP/MPLS is supposed to make networking cheaper. To make sure their networks can actually provide the right class of service to customers, service providers are only using about one-third of their capacity on average. Ensuring telecom customers waiting in line for service get the attention they deserve is the job of the routers that Axiowave and its competitors make.
Having been in the networking business some 18 years, Chatter marvels at the changes that telecom in general has caused around the world. “It’s quite fascinating to have two people, both roaming on their cell phones, in two different countries,” he says. “One time, at the airport in Paris, my family was heading off to India and my wife called me from the in-flight phone to my cell phone, while in-transit. It’s unbelievable — it was all sci-fi stuff just 30 years ago even!”
Your graduate studies focused on supercomputing. Does the telecom industry have much intersection with that?
Not really. In this particular case, IP/MPLS does the job of classifying packets, related to class of service. But the hardware required to implement the absolute quality of service — those concepts transcend any specific field, whether it’s telecom, supercomputing or anything else. In fact, high-end routers, to be honest with you, are more complex in terms of architectural technology than most of the supercomputers today. The reason is that supercomputers tend to have very predictable behavior, but the Internet by definition has unpredictability thrown at you in terms of what’s happening on the network side.
What kinds of things do you like to do when not working?
Put it this way, I hardly have much time to spend with my kids, so any time I get, I like to spend with them. But we do things together — I love soccer, I love racquetball, and then I love astronomy. I have a big telescope at home. The kids love to look through it and it gives them a chance, since they’re young, to look at the sky and the different things there. It gets their curiosity going, and it’s far superior to playing computer games. Generally, we look for whatever is the news of the day — maybe a star that’s more visible than at other times of the year.
Any interesting books you’ve read recently?
I love history. I just don’t read fiction at all — it’s been at least 20 years since I’ve read anything in fiction. The most recently book I bought was on Napoleon. It’s biographies and histories that fascinate me.
Do you feel they help inform your business career?
Probably in subtle ways. I don’t read them because it helps me in the business; I just read them because I enjoy reading about them. The last one I read prior to that was about Kemal Pasha of Turkey, so that gives you interesting insight because he changed that landscape against all odds over a period of 30 years. So how did he do that? What kinds of things drove him to do that? What kind of challenges did he face? It’s fascinating because there’s an almost infinite capacity of human beings to do things good or bad. It’s just like human ingenuity has no bounds in terms of technology, I think. Same thing applies to leaders and countries and politics.
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