DSL Prime: Showdown Between AT&T and Alcatel

Two companies used to delivering monopoly pricing and monopoly lack of service start an argument, and the governments of France and the U.S. may get involved as layoffs loom for thousands.

by Dave Burstein of DSL Prime and Future of TV and the Web Video Summit [March 21, 2007]

"You need the willingness to fail all the time," John Backus, creator of FORTRAN, from the NY Times obituary. "You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don't work."

Pat Russo's most crucial customer, AT&T, just publicly repudiated Alcatel's most important product line, broadband TV based on Microsoft. Alcatel and Microsoft are for now left out of the new AT&T led "Open IPTV" consortium. Siemens and Ericsson are in. I believe two crucial contracts have been given to Adtran and Ericsson. I have absolutely no confirmation, formal or informal, that AT&T's Alcatel/Microsoft deployment plans have actually changed.

(continued at end of issue)

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Much happier news from Germany, where Deutsche Telekom is nearly tripling their 50/10 VDSL deployment to nearly 8.2M homes passed in 2007. Swisscom also is choosing performance, bidding four billion for Fastweb's fiber across a third of Italy. That puts the heat on Telecom Italia, where Pirelli's Marco Tronchetti Provera is desperately looking for a buyer for the controlling stake. Provera has talked to everyone from Telefónica to Moscow's Sistema, although the government may prevent a sale abroad.

Back in the States, Jessica Rosenworcel has moved from the FCC to the Senate Commerce Committee. She's been responsible for some of the most thoughtful work at the FCC, and has the knowledge and personality to revitalize the Committee. She knows where most of the bodies are buried in USF, Missoula, and some of the other unreported D.C. scandals.

Jim Southworth, an old friend and mentor of many in the DSL industry has returned to health and now is looking for a regular or consulting gig. He's managed a major international network and supervised secure systems at a high level, hard skills to locate. Reach him at http://www.southworth.org

Wish I were at VON right now.

GloPhone, Tello Die on Eve of VON Conference
"In 2003, GloPhone.com confirmed the Internet's power to connect people worlds apart with Voice Over Internet Protocol. Unfortunately, after 4 amazing years, GloPhone.com has closed its doors on March 13, 2007."—GloPhone website

GloPhone experimented with calling plans beginning at about $2 per month and four cents a minute after that, but never reached the scale necessary to make that kind of business work. Skype won the hype game and was easy to use, Vonage was ubiquitous with $15 to $25 plans with customers acquired at the cost of most of a year's revenue, and cable VoIP is now offered to 60 percent of U.S. homes at a modest premium.

Tello, put together by my friend Jeff Pulver, still has the web site of an active company but the last news is from 8 months ago. That presumably means they hope for a buyer for their technology, "find me anywhere" presence software for corporate networks. I couldn't reach anyone as I wrote on the weekend, but Om Malik broke the story after visiting Tello's headquarters and finding them gone and the space for rent. They raised $15 million only last year, with Jeff joined by Craig McCaw, John Sculley, and Bell Canada in the funding rounds. The publicity was incredible, but the market apparently hasn't developed yet and the software development didn't come easily. Ironically, David Pogue just gave a rave in the NY Times to Grand Central, another "presence" application consolidating all your phone numbers and making it easy to find out who's in touch.

Om Malik, a friend, demonstrated yet again he's the best daily telecom reporter in the U.S. by breaking both these stories. Om separately wrote up Twitter, a cell phone app letting everyone at SXSW find each other in Austin. But it was a bit much to suggest Twitter has become passe now that "even the Wall Street Journal decided to weigh in." Om's great, and his colleague Paul Kapustka is doing great work on USF and other topics. The dozen reporters at WSJ still are darned strong team not easy to beat, even if they did let some technical errors make it to page one lately.

VON—Wish I Were There This Week
VON is without question the best telecom conference in North America now that SUPERCOMM is in decline. More new ideas there than at all the other big shows put together. Jeff produces a show that's lively enough that people want to go to join in, not just to show the corporate flag and conveniently take meetings. Carl Ford and team have freedom to pick the best speakers whether or not they buy sponsorships, I can testify from having been part of the process. Cynthia Brumfield's New Video Summit on Monday is particularly impressive, bringing imaginative people like Bram Cohen of Bittorrent together with Hollywood talent agents and the like. Skipping VON for now, because I'm chairing Web Video Summit in June. It isn't really a VON competitor, because WVS is more for the creators, but I thought it more diplomatic to pass this time. I hate to miss a good show, however.

Germany Tripling VDSL to 8.2 Million Homes Passed
14 more cities getting 10 Mbps up, 50 Mbps down
DT is dropping baby DSLAMs into 10,000 more "cable distributors." They will connect via 4,500 kilometers of new fiber optic cable, adding to the 14,000 kilometers of fiber for the first twelve large cites. The new deployments are Bochum, Bonn, Bremen, Darmstadt, Dortmund, Dresden, Duisburg, Essen, Karlsruhe, Ludwigshafen, Mainz, Mannheim, Wiesbaden and Wuppertal.

DT is also upgrading 9 million homes passed for ADSL2+ service, which they are selling as "up to 16 megabits." The deployment is continuing, with 24 more cities planned for VDSL in 2008 and several years before they have reached all 38 million German homes with improved service. They are calling the VDSL service "fiber to the curb" and suggesting that most homes will are within 300 meters and will get full speeds. I cannot get information from them about how many homes are up to 1,000 meters, and hence getting lower speeds. ECI, using Infineon chips, has been getting most of the early orders, with Siemens remaining hopeful. The set top runs on a Sigma Designs 8634 at 400 MHz; software is Microsoft IPTV, the only Microsoft deployment I know not on Alcatel DSLAMs.

Copyright 2007 Dave Burstein.
The DSL Prime Newsletter is reprinted with permission.

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