One notable growth area is support services. As Linux becomes the server platform of choice for enterprise customers, some of the problems encountered in the OS go beyond what the typical IT person can handle. In our tests, Caldera gave us the best service and ably answered our questions (see "TEAMwork Pays Off for Linux"). If getting providers to take on some of the workload is an option at your company, EDS offers good managed Web-hosting services. And Loudcloud can bring a ray of sunshine to your outsourced B2C needs as well.

The Downs and Ups of DSL

Given the spectacular failures in the DSL market last year--Excite being the most high-profile--you might think DSL is dead. Excite started out as a search engine, but the company expanded into new markets as opportunities arose. The loss of Excite wasn't about DSL alone--it was about an entire portal business that offered access to chat rooms and news.

Don't lose hope for DSL, though. SBC has become the largest provider of DSL, with more than 1 million of us signed up, not including the customers of smaller Tier 2 providers that use SBC's networks to deliver DSL to their customers. To improve on the speeds SBC can provide, the company is spending $6 billion on its Project Pronto initiative (see "FCC Grants SBC Permission for Pronto Project"). Pronto pushes the DSLAMs closer to the customer by deploying fiber from the CO directly to a neighborhood. This can cut dry copper runs from miles to just thousands or even hundreds of feet, increasing transmission speeds dramatically.

Wanted: Cheap Technology

Service providers need inexpensive technology to stay alive. And we don't mean technology they can sell to their customers but technology within their own networks. SONET has been a mainstay of the carrier/service provider market and some enterprises for 18 years now. It has grown from 155 Mbps to 64 times that in operational systems with 10-Gbps speeds. Systems in development increase that another four times, to 40 Gbps. Still, while SONET has held its own against many new technologies, it may have met its match in RPR (Resilient Packet Ring).

RPR (IEEE 802.17) is designed to offer service providers that operate MANs an alternative to deploying SONET networks. A collection of customer switches placed in a ring around a city or metroplex, a MAN uses SONET to operate more efficiently than a traditional point-to-point network. But with SONET, MAN providers are locked into a relatively expensive nonpacket-based system. RPR creates a packet-based network that operates in a ring fashion and offers quick failover and better use of packet-based network bandwidth than SONET does.

RPR will replace Ethernet in many situations where failover is essential. Ethernet is capable only of failing over or switching to an alternate route with the use of Spanning Tree technology. If a connection goes down, it could take a Spanning Tree network several seconds to find an alternate route. RPR does it in 50 milliseconds or less.

The RPR standard is still a work in progress, but a few vendors, including Luminous, are creating products. When the RPR standard reaches its final form (projected to be by March 2003), metro providers will benefit greatly from the technology. Not to be left out, enterprise customers operating campus networks will find advantages in RPR because it offers Ethernet over a ring topology without the expense of SONET or packet over SONET.

Although packetized voice services continue to languish in the service provider world, they are not forgotten. A new breed of switch, the MSS (multiservice switch), is emerging from Cisco and other vendors. Although MSSs are being touted as the penultimate convergence device, they really aren't anything new--just IADs (integrated access devices) on steroids, with most supporting SONET OC-12 or higher interfaces to the core network, usually with extended protocol support. MSS products bring voice and data together in one box. But while IADs have traditionally been based around frame relay or ATM, the MSS will do both, plus SONET.

MSS equipment is well-suited for service providers that want to eliminate the multiple devices they need in their PoPs (points of presence). Most of these devices aggregate different Layer 2 protocols into a SONET or ATM stream. One box is easier to maintain and can provide more services to customers because voice services can be included with data.

Voice integration from soft switches is taking time to catch on, with enterprise customers looking instead to deploy their own IP PBXs. Although soft switches offer high-end PBX features to companies on tight budgets, they carry the stigma of being nothing more than Centrex systems that now use IP. Placing the PBX at the service provider seems like a reversion to the old days of Centrex systems, but these devices offer many more features and generally operate the same as a locally placed PBX.

Darrin Woods is a technology editor of Network Computing. Darrin has worked as a WAN engineer for a telecom carrier. Send your comments on this article to him at dwoods@nwc.com.