The Young Turks

Amber Networks
CEO: Sam Mathann
Product: Routers for the edge of network
Operates in the less crowded edge area of the network. While the core getsthicker and thicker and carriers provide fat pipes to the users in the accessnetwork, there is a choke in the centre–the edge. Amber Networks promises tosolve that problem. Its Aggregate Service Routers, will help carriers aggregateall services–TDM, Frame Relay, ATM, and IP–onto the high-speed opticalbackbones.

Avici Systems
CEO: Surya Panditi
Product: High-speed terabit switch routers
Considered by many to be the only router designed keeping the reality of highbandwidth optical networks in mind, Avici’s terabit switch router is among thefastest routers for the core network. The company claims to have developed amechanism that allows the carriers to add and remove capacity from differentparts of a network automatically, allowing them to achieve a total capacitygreater than that provided by equipment.

Copper Mountain Networks
CEO: Rick Gilbert
Product: DSL
A niche player in end-to-end DSL solution, its DSLAMs are termed to be the bestin the industry. Its India plans are not known.

Ciena Corp.
CEO: Dr Patrick H Nettles
Product: Optical networking
One of the first companies to make working DWDM systems, Ciena’s firstproduct, MultiWave Sentry 4000, allows big backbone providers to mix differentkinds of traffic–SDH, ATM, and IP–over a common fibre network. It has sincethen added multiservices transport platform that helps the local serviceproviders effectively provide multiple services over common access network.

Clarent Corp.
CEO: Jerry Chang
Product: Various IP telephony products
Probably the only company that targets both the carriers and enterprises, thoughthe former is the focus. It also distinguishes itself from others by combiningthe basic IP switching infrastructure and enhanced voice processing applicationson a single platform. It recently entered India in partnership with D-Link andis targeting both the NLDOs and the FSPs.

EmpowerTel Networks
CEO: Ajit Medhekar
Product: Unified services switch
Unified Service Exchange USX 1000 combines IP and TDM switching into one switch,thereby giving the traditional carriers a path to smoothly migrate to packetinfrastructure. For new carriers who have to deal with a lot of TDM traffic fromconnected networks–like in India–it gives an option to start with packetnetworks that smoothly talks to a TDM network without requiring to convert andreconvert.

Juniper Networks
CEO: Scott Krien
Product: High-speed routers for the core
This high-speed routing company promoted by tech whiz kid, Pradeep Sindhu, isthe rallying point for all carrier equipment makers’ competitors who areunable to challenge Cisco single-handedly. And they included all big names–Nortel,Ericsson, and Alcatel. Termed sometimes as the Cisco killer, Juniper’s routers–M20through M160–have changed the way the world looked at routing. It has takenIndia very seriously, with a direct presence here. Its targets are NLDOs, theFSPs, and even the metro network builders.

Redback Networks
CEO: Vivek Raghavan
Product: Unified service management system
Redback offers what it calls the New Access Network. Redback solutions convertany broadband connection to IP in the service aggregation point. That makes iteasier for the carrier to manage multiple kinds of traffic in a simplifiedmanner on a common service management interface, and yet provide different kindsof services to different types of customers. Siara Systems, another companypromoted by CEO Raghavan merged into Redback.

Sonus Networks
CEO: Hasan Ahmad
Product: Unified services switch
Sonus is the first company to develop a carrier class unified service switchthat combines TDM and packet switching smoothly in one platform, integrated withthe softswitch capability. It offers its Open Services Architecture for carriersto develop new services almost on demand. Sonus’s monopoly in this area sincethen has been challenged by EmpowerTel Networks.

Sycamore Networks
CEO: Dan Smith
Product: Optical internetworking
This company, promoted by successful serial entrepreneur Gururaj Deshpande, isknown for its record-breaking opening on the NASDAQ. However, the companypioneered the term intelligent optical internetworking, which allows the lightpaths to be switched in the optical domain without being converted into theelectrical domain. This helps in taking up the actual speed of optical networksseveral times higher and turns the theoretical capability of optical networks toactual usable bandwidth.