Issues and News

Twenty years ago, the essentially the only "services" that were offered by the telcos were transport services. At least in the US, the ability of the telcos to offer services beyond basic transport were severely limited in the immediate post-divestiture era.

However, over the course of the past twenty years, at least two major shifts have occurred. The service providers are now allowed to offer enhanced "managed services," and the extent to which these services offer reasonable value to customers has increased exponentially.

However, by most metrics, these enhanced services have failed to be adopted to any significant extent.

So the question is "why"? Is it a case of companies not trusting the service providers - maybe with good reason? Is there too much BYOB (Be Your Own Bell) attitude in the user community? Is the pricing wrong? Are the service providers ineffective at selling these services?

What is the key missing ingredient in having these services take off?

Posted by Steven Taylor at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

The recent movement to deploy open source based products has now reached out to the WAN equipment market. In particular, there are now open source based PBXs and routers. Is this a cute fad that will soon die or will it take off and be as successful as LINUX? Speaking of LINUX, if there is a problem with LINUX researchers around the globe rush to fix it. That will not be the case with open source PBXs and routers.

Posted by Jim Metzler at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

In the laterst MegaMerger-of-the-Month, Lucent and Alcatel have announced an intent to merge. While the question of whether this is a good move for the two companies is not a primary concern for corporate users, the impact of this merger indeed does have a potentially profound impact.

So the question whether thsi is a good move or a bad move for the corporate network. Of particular concern, will this trend of megamergers slow innovation in the industry in general? Also, what wil be the impact standards and interoperability if each large company starts to produce its own internal architecture?

Posted by Steven Taylor at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)