Alcatel Delivers Packet Access WholesalingSystem

Posted: 11/1999

Alcatel Delivers Packet Access Wholesaling
System
By Peter Lambert

Wholesaling of dial-up and broadband Internet access services just became easier to
grow and to manage, according to Plano, Texas-based manufacturer Alcatel USA. The company
has introduced a software package designed to provide centralized controls for large-scale
regional, national and international networks of access gear from multiple vendors.

Facilities-based network service providers (NSPs) can use Alcatel’s A1135 SMC Service
Management Center software to provision, wholesale and manage services ranging from garden
variety dial-up ports to voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), fax over IP (FoIP) or
digital subscriber line (DSL) access–all from a central management console that monitors
and controls hundreds of remote access servers (RASs).

"The SMC will allow us to create a network infrastructure ideal for ISP (Internet
service provider) and corporate access wholesaling," says Jason Mills, vice president
of network operations for Stockton, Calif.-based Pac-West Telecomm Inc., which has
purchased SMC gear to support 40,000 dial ports, plus future broadband access equipment.
"With the SMC, we are able to give our access wholesale customers a virtual network
spanning the western United States for substantially less than it would have cost them to
build the infrastructure themselves."

Through centralized management of IP addresses, the system enables NSPs like Pac-West
to create and manage a virtual remote access network for each customer. Within each of
those virtual networks, the customer can assign and manage its own pool of IP addresses
regardless of the number, type or location of access devices, providing a more scaleable
system than the extensive, manual, RAS-by-RAS configuration heretofore required for
geographically distributed operations.

The SMC is interoperable with RAS and broadband remote access server (B-RAS) products
from 3Com Corp., Santa Clara, Calif.; Cisco Systems Inc., San Jose, Calif.; Intel Corp.,
Santa Clara, Calif.; Lucent Technologies Inc./Ascend Communications Inc., Alameda, Calif.;
and Alcatel’s own DSL and RAS equipment.

"It’s a significant development primarily because it’s cross-platform," says
Michael Spayer, associate analyst for The Yankee Group, Boston. "Unlike single-vendor
solutions, you can now bundle ports on geographically dispersed RAS platforms from
different manufacturers, so if an ISP needs coverage in a new area, [it] can buy the ports
wholesale, then logically link them into [its] network."

Available immediately and priced beginning at $20 per port, the SMC runs on a
Houston-based Compaq Computer Corp. DEC Alpha platform to manage up to 2.5 million
subscribers per server or up to 5 million subscribers per server cluster. SMC integrates
address management and remote access dial-in user service (RADIUS) authentication and
authorization services, and it features an accounting, billing and invoicing processing
module for billing based on amount of data transferred, total access time and/or time of
day.