How to slip multiservice networks past customers
Too many new service providers, armed with analysts' reports touting "convergence," have rushed into the marketplace with a story that really addresses their own problems more than their customers' problems.
The service providers' biggest problem? Low margins caused by incumbent-carrier loop rental charges, price resistance by small to medium-sized customers, and high fixed expenses for everything from sales training to legal fees.
Their solution? Try to boost margins by selling users multiple services under the familiar slogans of "converged networks," "integrated access" and "one-stop shopping." But real-life customers don't buy this way. Here's what they want:
There's one equipment start-up that's trying to move its service-provider customers past sterile "convergence" offers onto the more fertile ground of today's user hunger for advanced data services -- and then throw in voice as icing on the cake. They're doing this by directly addressing the carriers' margin problem up front in scalable equipment instead of laying it off on perplexed end users.
Anaheim, Calif.-based Mariner Networks is making an ATM-based multiservice access device called the Dexter 3000 that isn't so cheap it maxes out at a couple of T-1s or so expensive that it skips past the needs of medium-sized enterprise locations. Mariner says it's targeting the 800,000 or so U.S. office locations housing 100 to 500 employees with the one-rack-unit device costing about $3,000. These are users with serious data needs that can't be met by older generations of ATM IADs with limited processing power.
The Dexter 3000 box is a three-slot modular device, with interface modules supporting T-1/E-1, standards-based inverse multiplexing over ATM for multiple T-1/E-1s, DS-3, and recently introduced OC-3 optical access. It has an Ethernet 10BaseT port, and contains key WAN connectivity features for both frame relay/ATM end users and those building pure IP virtual private networks. Those include Layer 3 wire-speed switching, frame relay to ATM interworking based on Frame Relay Forum specs, RFC 1483 bridged and routed IP, and PPP over ATM. But it also supports toll-quality voice while employing voice compression and silence suppression via ATM's well-documented quality-of-service capabilities.
Mariner marketing VP Tracy Earles says Mariner is going after data-oriented CLECs who want to speak first to today's customer data needs but also have a way to bundle in voice services as an extra benefit. If you're thinking of the DSL carriers who have been reeling, that's not quite the market he means. There's another generation of CLECs that are growing up selling VPNs, hosting and e-commerce services instead of the me-too voice services and T-1s that older, troubled CLECs got into -- and tended to emphasize in their initial "integrated access" offers. If you want to get an idea of what I mean, go to the Web site of Mariner CLEC customer ConnectSouth at http://www.connectsouth.com and see how this service provider is presenting its product lineup.
Ordinarily I wouldn't make a big deal of a start-up's advisory board, but Mariner's deserves mention for two individuals in particular. One is former Sprint group president Kevin Brauer, who helped design the carrier's ATM-based convergence service called ION and knows the pitfalls. The other is David Ellis, vice president of information services for Home Depot, a company known for trying integrated access at its store locations. For more information about Mariner and the Dexter 3000, go to http://www.marinernetworks.com.
» posted by ITworld staff
Network World
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