Hoist the Sails or Lower the Lifeboats: Anticipating the Survival of the Local Telco

I became an installer / repairman for New England Telephone in 1969. I worked through college maintaining a #5 crossbar central office. I read schematics and fixed lots of troubles by adjusting springs and burnishing contacts on relays.

I worked hard to learn the technology, almost always on my own initiative. I was there to cut the new electronic 1E and 1A ESS central offices into service. Within a decade, the analog 1E and 1A electronic switches gave way to the 5E and DMS100 digital switch. I did my share of central office conversions.

I worked on the implementation of the SS7 network. We provisioned the 56 kilobit "A" link pairs and converted the trunks with new software capabilities. At about the same time we deployed the first ISDN circuits. We supported some of the largest ISDN projects in the country and some of us became resources for other regions.

In 1990 I moved to Bellcore TEC where I wrote and taught courses on the 5E switch, ISDN and the SS7 network - the best and most challenging job I ever had. I worked with a remarkable staff and we pushed each other to be the best we could be.

In 1994 I went to MIT to operate the telecom network. We built our first web page from scratch and connected to a new browser called Mosaic. We worked hard to upgrade a 5E switch on the verge of obsolescence. In 18 months we went from the 5E5 generic to the 5E 9 generic. Remote access became very popular. We had a large modem pool of 14.4 kilobit modems which we upgraded to 28.8 kilobit modems for that lightning speed. We had 330 modems in the pool and this moved the switch busy hour from 10:30 - 11:30am to midnight - 1am. We used MIT's Techmail as our email service and it worked better than anything else at the time.

With much of the interesting work done, I decided to move on. Remote access was the rage and I went to work at Shiva on the LandRover Access Switch. I also worked in the Interoperability Lab where we tested our products against our competitors. This exciting company became a breeding ground for many telecom equipment companies in the Boston area.

The industry kept changing. I worked on telecom products at Compaq at a time when they were selling 4 million PCs and the market was saturated. How to keep the ball rolling? We formed a group including Compaq, Intel, and Microsoft to try to move the market in a favorable direction. We researched market data and used focus groups to understand that people bought computers for Internet access. The way to entice people to buy new computers was to develop processor intensive content. But, to do this, remote access needed improvement. The question became how to dramatically increase access speeds to enable the download of the enhanced content. There were two possible solutions: cable modems and ADSL.

The group focused on ADSL for its dedicated bandwidth and on telecom companies because they owned the wire to the subscriber. We organized a coalition with Ameritech, Bell South and Southwest Bell. Bell Atlantic took longer to see the potential of standards-based ADSL and we had to drag them in kicking and screaming. In 1998, the result was the G.Lite specification which defines procedures to connect ADSL without rolling a truck to connect the subscriber.

In 1999, I joined the consulting firm, Belenos, where we worked with companies in the deployment of converged networks. I left to start Watershed Networks just before Belenos was acquired in 2001.

I had long seen the promise of broadband connections to support distance learning and online training and we began to develop new courses and our proprietary learning environment. Over the next few years, we watched the promise of broadband and the Internet become everyday reality. Voice over IP went from being a theory to a commonplace means of connecting a telephone.

Standing now on the periphery of the telecom industry and looking over the evolution I have witnessed, the old telcos look like stately wooden ships caught in a 100 year storm. The choices before the consumer continue to multiply. Those thousands of miles of copper wire and massive circuit-switched networks no longer offer the only way to reach across the world, nor the fastest, cheapest or most versatile. We're left now with what those many copper pairs represent; each one a relationship with a customer. These old tall ships have seasoned crews. It's up to every small telecom company to read the waves and plot a course which takes them, their customers, and their industry into the Internet era. For the first time in a hundred years, it's not the telecom industry that needs to innovate. More than ever before, it needs to educate itself, from receptionist to CEO. Telecom companies need to understand changing cultures and new technologies that enable people to communicate. We face a sea change and these seas are too high to ride at anchor; it's time to hoist the sails or lower the lifeboats.

Walt Mansell
CEO
Watershed Networks, Inc.