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A Look at the Sessions
The sessions were lightly attended for the most part, and featured some very good presenters and lots of open communication. Some highlights:
The Buyers’ Panel: Representatives from Level (3); CityNet; Mcleod and DeltaCom outlined what they are looking for from their partners – current and future. These companies are keenly interested in working with partners who can bond with them electronically, are staffed with people who can efficiently and pro-actively handle delivery problems, and get the bills in quickly and accurately. While each indicated an interest in doing more business with the COMPTEL membership, they admitted that when it comes down to ordering essential capacity, they will often turn to the LEC because as the Level (3) rep noted, they are prepared to “pay a little more for certainty” and “you know what you get there.”
Another important requirement was that vendors come in having done their homework. What services are offered? How are they packaged and priced? Will it be easy to configure your product offerings to my service definitions or will it cause huge effort in our IT, Marketing, and Billing groups? Clearly, vendors who came in prepared to align their product with the existing services as defined would have the inside track to new business.
View from the Top: Jerry James, the CEO of the COMPTEL organization led a question and answer session with Ron Beaumont of HyperCube, Royce Holland of McLeod, and Carl Grivner of XO in a traditional “fireside chat.” These are accomplished professionals, perfectly at ease with the venue and very personable – if not completely frank. They wooed the audience with war stories illustrating management styles and knotty problems. Much of this was management mainstays like good attitude, setting goals, and increasing communications, “the perfect is the enemy of the good” – it was clear that these leaders were quite genuine and thoroughly enjoyed their jobs. From laid-back Texas style “when you find a rattlesnake - kill it,” to the by-the-book ex-marine’s call to “make the FCC open and fair,” and the call to “Never give in,” this panel entertained and informed.
Next Generation Networks
Cisco lead a marathon NGN run of three back to back sessions, and while there was the inevitable Cisco promotion: “any content, anywhere, anytime,” they did marshal an impressive lineup of speakers from including customer and vendor partner representatives. The sessions were efficiently run and a delight to attend. |
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Gary Kim of Dagda Nor Media, Inc.
was the most forward looking of
the NGN presenters. He noted that
"All the future innovation
is coming from outside the enterprise". |
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Paul Coggin of Dynetics gave one of the broadest presentations on applying security policy that Wedge has seen. Of relevance to our community, he said that element management and network management applications were the biggest holes in security today and his first choice of attack when testing a network’s ability to be penetrated (quaintly called “capturing the flag”). Often the default passwords and application designer’s back doors are left wide open – and a successful penetration can go unnoticed by the provider, even as the network is taken over. He also warned of Oracle databases - as deployed, not as designed - being inadequately protected by current security practices. We should take this as a strong call to action and a good reason to wake up some operations engineers in the middle of the night!
Cisco also facilitated a strong panel of hosting service providers. Paetec, Global Metroplex, GNI, and Terremark explained the future market of online gaming and advanced service-hosting data centers. The increasing importance of this market can be seen by the shift in the impact of the data centers themselves. In the past, data centers were always located near major internet peering points and pops. Now, these data centers consume so much access bandwidth that the peering points are moving to be closer to them. This world of net-neutral, service brokering, on-net services, and their vast, modern data-megaplexes, hosting customers such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube and Akami would have seemed a little out place at COMPTEL and indeed these fellows did not show up. Their presence could certainly be felt…!
On the international side, Luis Fiallo, of China Telecom USA, placed the changing world telecommunications ecosystem into stark perspective with a talk on the “Borderless Ecosystem.” China’s networks are already surpassing the USA in numbers of data and voice connections. But their pool of customers and future business is only lightly penetrated. Their future NGN-IP network “CN2” is in development with 200 domestic NGN nodes and 20 International NGN nodes. With state mandated coverage everywhere for mobile communications, cellular service availability in China exceeds the USA.
As highlighted in many of the Regulatory panels, it is ironic, or perhaps simply very
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