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Survival is key message at SuperComm show

Show is more about reemergence from downturn.

By Tim Greene and Jim Duffy
Network World, 06/10/02

ATLANTA - Despite the best efforts of vendors to hawk their wares, attendees at last week's SuperComm were more concerned with lifelines than product lines.

The buzz at the show, which is largely geared toward service providers, had more to do with surviving the current downturn than it did with the next big technology or innovation. There were plenty of product announcements, but virtually all were of marginal importance as vendors chose not to cause a stir in an environment where customers are not spending and companies are shedding hundreds of thousands of employees.

The slump in attendance at SuperComm reflected the slump in the industry. Attendance was off 30% from last year, from 52,822 to just less than 37,000. Exhibit space was down by 37,490 square feet, although show officials said there were only 28 fewer exhibitors than last year.

Edge router start-up Allegro Networks did not exhibit at SuperComm, but hosted a wake for the telecom industry that featured a tombstone engraved with the names of defunct companies and a coffin filled with beer.

"It's like we're in a lifeboat, there's no food, there's no water and everybody's waiting to see who'll still be alive when the supply ship comes," said Daniel Briere, CEO of TeleChoice and a Network World columnist.

Some followed Allegro's lead and tried to find the lighter side of the landscape. Intel's CEO Craig Barrett used a video of himself in a black suit and dark glasses as the introduction to his keynote address. The video seemed to trace him traveling via the Internet from Intel's California headquarters to SuperComm.

"It seems the industry needs a little levity and some new applications to get it out of its doldrums," Barrett said after materializing onstage.

Cisco CEO John Chambers also injected some merriment with a keynote that featured much good-natured ribbing with a Cisco employee demonstrating Internet applications that could raise the profile of service providers with their customers, and Cisco's fortunes in the service provider market.

Cisco got down to business, rolling out 10G bit/sec Ethernet and Dynamic Packet Transport interfaces for its 12000 series Internet routers. Cisco claims to be the first to market with a routed 10G bit/sec Ethernet interface.

Other announcements at the show included:

Lucent's high-density APX 8100 universal gateway, which is designed to let service providers deliver dial-up IP remote access and voice-over-IP services for their business and residential customers;

Nortel's addition of software to its Shasta 5000 Broadband Services Node that lets the box terminate IP-Security VPN tunnels from the same VPN clients that are used with Nortel's Contivity gateways, and supports network-based virus scanning and intrusion detection;

Sycamore Networks' enhancement to its SN 3000 grooming switch, which conserves bandwidth by packing data onto the ring in 50M bit/sec increments. Without this capability, traffic may not fill up 155M bit/sec and 622M bit/sec pipes and bandwidth would be wasted.

Extensions to Tellabs' 5500 and 6500 cross-connects that let service providers eliminate the need for stand-alone add/drop multiplexers at the hub and end-office locations, and increase network density for operating cost and floor-space reductions of 50% and 80%, respectively. Tellabs 5500 digital cross-connect systems currently handle 75% of all network traffic in the U.S.

A group of vendors also used the show to launch an initiative called the Service Creation Community. The group includes Microsoft, Siemens and ADC Telecom.