Lucent bares new technologies

In the next few months, top telecom companies in the country will be adopting new technologies that will allow them to handle up to 1,000 simultaneous calls in a single copper line at a very low cost.

Greg Marshall, president of Lucent Technologies Philippines, said yesterday that with the digital subscriber line (DSL), carriers no longer need to put up expensive infrastructure but can utilize their existing facilities to accommodate more voice and data traffic.

As a result, he said, companies would be able to offer cheaper services to their customers.

Although Lucent's DSL box called "Stinger" can normally manage 16 calls at the same time, he said that it could be upgraded to carry as much as 1,000 calls. It can also provide dedicated high-speed data and Internet access over the same basic telephone line.

"There is nothing like this here now. At present, when you dial a number, you occupy the whole line. Stinger splits the line so that it can be used for different applications," he explained.

Marshall said that all the major players such as the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT), Bayan Telecommunications Inc. (BayanTel), Globe Telecom, Pilipino Telephone Corp. (Piltel), Isla Communications Co. (Islacom) and Digital Telecommunications Philippines Inc. (Digitel) are interested in the product.

"They are very close to adopting the technology which is a very powerful tool and they are currently evaluating it. We believe that within the third quarter of this year, this technology will be introduced already in the Philippines", he said.

According to Marshall, since Stinger was launched in the US and Europe in September last year, the demand has remained very high as it is only priced at less than $1 million per system, much cheaper than rolling out additional telephone lines and putting up outside plants.

At the same time, he said there will come a time when copper wires will be replaced by the more expensive fiber optic networks which are able to transmit infrared and visible light frequencies through a hair-thin strand of glass fiber, with a laser of light emitting diode.

The glass fiber, also known as optical fiber, is to light what copper wire is to electricity.

Marshall said that to bring next-generation telecom solutions to the local market, Lucent will focus products to over 10 gigabit optical networking.

In other countries, he said that Lucent already brings such networking capacity directly to the Internet service providers (ISPs) and business customers.

He said that with 10 Gbs, carriers can build local data networks that are four times faster than today and also provide up to 60 percent cost savings which is equivalent to transmitting a two-million page document in a second.