Once the shining star of the telecommunications equipment industry after AT&T spun it off in 1996, Lucent has recently been struggling to compete in two of the hottest areas of the industry, the markets for big router boxes that handle Internet traffic and optical networking systems.
In contrast, a couple of days later Broadcom came out with a similar fast Ethernet statement, but this time they had a group of their customers, including all the big router and networking companies, endorse it.
The big routers and network-switching equipment that make up its core business are custom-built to order.
Savvis puts in big routers, with direct connections into the backbone.
In the Huawei deal, 3Com will take over sales of Huawei's big routers to businesses, while the Chinese firm will continue to focus on telecommunications companies.
From the computing point of view these devices are more like "cable bridges," since they are always on and basically "bridge" the user to the cable head-end, where requests for web pages are processed by big routers.
The only things Ascend needs to make a credible run at Cisco are big routers that move lots of data traffic, and enterprise side switches, which concentrate and direct network data within companies.
Bay has a strong business in ATM on the enterprise side, and competes with Cisco in big routers; Cascade gives Ascend a strong product line for that gear at the carrier space.
No wonder Corvis managed to steal the thunder from other startups such as Nexabit Networks, Pluris, and Sonus, all which are introducing big routers with a theme towards multiservice IP, or cell-based infrastructure.
These products essentially keep track of, and smooth out, all the incoming high-speed requests from the telco world, serving as middlemen to the big routers that actually offer the connections to the IP world, and finally can provide billing and logging services that can keep track of the traffic at a fine level of granularity.
Huawei, China's biggest router company, now sells cheap equipment to U.S. businesses through a joint venture with 3Com Corp., a company recently near death in the face of Cisco's onslaught.
