Analysis: IP, IP, hooray... fibre's on the way

Rival Actelis, which supplies Britain's Easynet, claims to have an edge in that it supports repeaters on leased lines, extending the reach of copper.

"This is particularly good for educational establishments because they tend to situated well away from metropolitan centres where the core network is," said Craig Easley, vice-president of marketing.

Also interested are mobile-phone companies, who are running out of capacity on lines running from mobile masts, because they can increase bandwidth without laying down new lines.

But the emerging next-generation networks are not all about IP, which is not good at delivering data easily in the timely fashion required by some applications, because packets take any available route, like cars on a road network, and don't necessarily arrive in step with how they left.

Resolute Networks claims to have the answer with a range of modules that perform what it calls circuit emulation, which creates within an IP link a "pseudowire" that behaves like an old circuit-switched line and is able to deliver timely data. Again, a common use is on the feed lines for cellular base stations.

Pseudowires are also used for services such as credit-card transactions to shield a datastream from the network operator, says Resolute's vice-president of business development Daniel Bar-Lev.

Technology is not the only thing to change in this new packet-switched world. Voice-over-IP, having turned telco economics upside down, is changing business practices, according to enterprise communications specialist Avaya.

Chris Barrow, senior manager of analyst relationships, says integrated communications systems can reduce what he calls "human latency". This is not, he insists, yet another plot to use technology to get us to work even harder: it can actually save you work.

"If you get an email copied to five other people that needs action, you could send out an email to all of them and wait for their reply. Or you could click on the other five recipients and our system could set up a conference call, which would be far quicker."

And some things never change. Barrow says: "Voice will always be the killer application. People will always want to talk to each other."

*Avaya is about to launch a software for Symbian-based Wifi-enabled phones that will switch seamlessly between Wifi and GSM as you walk in or out of range of the office network.

See also:
Why websites go down
Mobile operators 'will run out of bandwidth'