|
Carrier Services
Alcatel: Customer Wins and IP Portfolio Expansion
President of Fixed Communications Division Bullish on Triple Play
by Ken Wieland
Alcatel made a flurry of announcements today at the BBWF
event in Paris. In a deal worth €80 m, the French supplier is
to provide Wind -- an altnet in Italy -- with ‘an end-to-end’
triple play solution. Although Microsoft TV will provide the
middleware for the IPTV solution, Michel Rahier, president of
Alcatel’s fixed line communications division, said that would
only account for a ‘very small portion’ of the €80 m contract.
In Latin America, Alcatel also said that it had secured a deal
with Telefonica to provide access, metro Ethernet and IP edge
router kits, as well as optical transport networks. The value of
this deal was not disclosed.
As part of broadening its IP portfolio, Alcatel further
announced an expansion of its carrier Ethernet switches and
routers, which, said Rahier, would enable service providers to
aggregate video far more cost effectively at the required
quality of service. Alcatel is introducing a 12-slot 400Gbps
version of its 7450 Ethernet Service Switch (ESS) and a 4-slot
9Gbps version of its 7710 service router.
Rahier said that Alcatel has now 140 customers for its carrier
Ethernet range and that 11,500 boxes have been
shipped. “In the IP edge router market we are catching up,
big time, with Cisco and Juniper,” said Rahier. He went on to
claim that Alcatel has a 17 per cent share of the IP edge
router market.
Alcatel’s fixed-line communications division continues to grow
strongly – it posted its ‘best ever’ quarterly result in Q1 2006,
buoyed by demand for triple play and IP edge routers
(see related article, "Alcatel Buoyed by Triple Play") -- and passed
the milestone of shipping 100 million DSL lines this week. The French
supplier claims that it has got about 35 percent share of the
access market.
For future growth areas, Rahier highlighted IPTV, IMS
infrastructure and applications, and the 802.16e ‘mobile’
WiMax standard. “The savings that we plan to make through
the merger with Lucent, through the trimming down of
[product development] duplication, will be channelled in these
areas,” said Rahier. “We’re currently working out how much
investment will be available.”
In the IPTV market, Rahier was confident that the number of
subscribers worldwide would rise dramatically from a modest
three million in mid-2006 to 100 million by the end of 2010.
He acknowledged that there had been delays in some IPTV
rollouts but they weren’t significantly lengthy enough to affect
his 2010 forecast. Moreover, those delays, claimed Rahier,
were down to the failure of operators to do due diligence on
testing and interoperability rather than any shortcomings on
the part of Alcatel.
In the IMS market, Rahier said that Alcatel was shipping
TISPAN-compliant equipment to 10-12 customers, while 75 of
Alcatel’s customers had ‘IMS-ready’ equipment already in
their networks. “On a worldwide basis, there are around one
million subscribers to commercial IMS services using our
equipment,” said Rahier.
In terms of GPON investment, Alcatel is seeing far greater
traction in the US market than in Europe. Different regulatory
regimes, clearly, are having different effects on the levels of
high-speed access investment around the world.
“Today’s separate legacy regulations on media, internet and
voice has become a blocking factor rather than an enabler for
future investment,” Mike Quigley, Alcatel’s president and
CEO, told the Telecommunications® online service at the BWF
event. “US RBOCS are rapidly deploying FTTH and FTTN
whereas comparable long-term investments are blocked or
made more difficult by regulation in places such as Germany,
Holland and Australia.”
He added: “Structural separation [of telcos] could impede
renovation in access – not
accelerate it.”
|
