Who in the telcommunications world is driving innovation?
Last Wednesday, Sprint Canada proudly announced they have just launched Canada’s Sprint first IP Enabled Solution.
To them, I have to say, welcome to 1999.
1999 is when Bell Canada introduced IP enabled solutions and a fully-optical IP network. They were the first ones to do so in North America, let alone Canada.
2000 was when Bell Canada officially introduced their IP VPN service running Cisco MPLS. Sprint Canada pledges to launch their MPLS network in 2005.
2001 was when Bell Canada introduced Bandwidth on Demand; with a few clicks of a mouse on a web portal, a customer can go from 20Mbps to 40Mbps within less than a day.
2002 was when Bell Canada introduced VoIP solutions to complement the QoS-saavy MPLS network.
2003 was when Bell Canada introduced managed IP security and hosted telephony solutions to customers.
Looking forward, Bell Canada, Aliant, Bell West and Nortel Networks has recently pledged to invest $200 million to build their Next Generation Network. I’m thrilled about this, because we’re about to really eat our own dogfood now; the NGN will be more robust and flexible than any other data network ever introduced. The plan is to migrate over to VoIP, and maintain voice carrier-grade reliability.
It will be converged, with voice and multimedia on a single network. Customers will be able to make video calls. Unified messaging will become closer to reality. With a single ID such as an email address, you will be able to ring up someone’s office phone, cellphone, computer and PDA all at once.
So by 2006, one year after Sprint launches their “revolutionary” network, Bell will have already moved on to something even better. As Sprint is just dipping its toes in the pool, Bell has already hit the showers.
Who in the telcommunications world is driving innovation?