DRAWBACKS
Polycom is one of the third-party developers that Nortel announced last May as part of an initiative to encourage outside development on the MCS platform. Reference designs for third-party devices are now available through Texas Instruments. That initiative is important because SIP interoperability is notoriously difficult. If carriers are to adopt the MCS, Nortel must provide them with an easy way to multisource consumer products
The value of such an initiative may be limited to consumers, however. Enterprise users will need access to the advanced telephony functions they expect from an enterprise-class PBX. Functions such as call park, where users put a call on hold and retrieve it from a different extension, require the use of UniStim, Nortel's proprietary client protocol, which the Texas Instruments designs won't include.
As third-party devices are brought into the MCS fold and allowed to benefit from new types of presence statuses, Nortel will want to look at updating its presence model. Nortel currently offers presence based on users' availability and whether they're active or inactive. Users can configure a banned list to prohibit select others from monitoring their status.
Next year, expect Nortel to expand this presence model. The company will add group presence, where personal availability is aggregated up into the availability of workgroups, and device presence, where users can look at the status of equipment. Nortel is said to be considering improving its centralized presence management, allowing network architects to establish presence policies on who can view an individual's presence status without having to configure those policies themselves. Over the longer term, Nortel will introduce federated services that will allow companies to interconnect their MCSs. Such a move could make workgroup collaboration as useful and as popular as e-mail.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
