Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Wireless is cool.

I've completed the third day of Motorola iDEN training, so I'm getting a really solid idea of how all the features of currently deployed cell phone technology have been bolted onto the old stuff.  It is intriguing how the big iron phone switch makers have held their place in the wireless world.  The writing is on the wall for the old DMS-100 family and Lucent 5ESS switches to become completely edged out of the MSO picture, as more and more of the functionality is being replaced by packet and frame technology.  That's job security for me.  I can see how Motorola is engineering their way around the DMS-100 for their next iDEN system release.  B'bye Nortel.  Hello softswitch.  They've already incorporated the Cisco MGX 8850 into their Push-to-Talk (dispatch) offering.  It's not that big a step to plop a wireless softswitch into the picture and eliminate the bulky old circuit switched elements for making regular calls.  I don't even see that Nortel has a wireless softswitch offering.  I wonder if Lucent or Cisco or TELOS will win that market share.  Even Samsung has one now.  SONUS, Tekelec, and Spatial are the new wireless softswitch players.  I'm guessing that if one of them gets ahead, Cisco will buy 'em.  My biggest curiosity is if the Lucent Softswitch could eliminate the Nortel presence  in the wireless world altogether.

NOTE:  I found later that Nortel doesn't call it a wireless softswitch.  In true old school telecom form, they have created an acronym which is completely meaningless, P-MSC.

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