Keynotes from top executives addressed carriers new role

TIA attracted top executives from leading carrier and vendor companies, including AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson and Verizon CTO Tony Melone. Randall predicted chaos over the next 4 to 5 years, because applications and services today can come from anywhere and bring unpredictable new network demands.

He said it was AT&T’s role to manage that chaos and was looking for government tax and regulatory policy support to justify the multibillion-dollar investments necessary for the capacity increases to support new services. He also said AT&T is burning through spectrum, and although Congress and the FCC are working toward making new spectrum available, AT&T can’t wait the expected 6 or 7 years for the completion of that process. Not surprisingly, Mr. Stephenson said approval of AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile would bring an immediate lift in effective capacity as well as $8 billion in capex to build out AT&T’s network, and it brings a broadband solution to rural America in the process.

Tony Melone’s Keynote addressed Verizon’s recent acquisition of TerreMark, a cloud services provider. Tony talked about the trend to separate services from the network and how the TerreMark acquisition would help accelerate Verizon’s move in that direction. Verizon already offers cloud services like FlexView to its FiOS video-on-demand customers; FlexView allows subscribers to watch content anywhere on any IP device. In addition, the Verizon Digital Media Services offering helps content providers reach subscribers over Verizon’s cloud.

OneChip was the only optical transceiver vendor exhibiting and speaking at TIA 2011. OneChip is an Ottawa-based startup founded in 2005. It produces optical transceivers that are based on photonic integrated circuits (PICs) using monolithic Indium Phosphide (InP) technology. OneChip’s PICs provide all the optical functions required in an ONU used in a FTTH PON. With continued strong pressure on ONU pricing, OneChip claims its PIC technology can provide 20% cost savings over discrete free-space optical assemblies or planar lightwave circuit assemblies. The company is targeting EPON, GPON, Active Ethernet, XGPON, and other business and consumer markets for optical transceivers.

July 25, 2011

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