Dell pitches products to drag telcos into next-gen networks Dell will showcase kit for the comms industry at next week's Mobile World Congress, with more infrastructure choices, PowerEdge servers for telecoms, Private Wireless network options, and a new lab for punters to validate network configurations. The Round Rock giant is trying to make money by walking the telecoms sector …
I used to work for a computer company that decided it should target telcos with its systems. Techically fine, the equipment was great, but neither the managers nor the software developers ever understood telco requirements. In the "internet age" they presumed that everyone wanted the latest gear, and would upgrade/change hardware frequently, and they would not listen when they were told otherwise (by me, and by the telco buyers). Software updates? Sure, every 6 months would be fine.
Err, no. Telcos expect to install hardware that will run unchanged and be fully supported for 10+ years. Software upgrades maybe every 2-3 years if there's a good reason, but if not then 10+ year support on the installed version is mandatory. If an update or patch is needed, it must be zero downtime, the idea that "an hour outage on a Sunday evening will be fine" just doesn't cut it for a 6-nines system. The software guys just laughed at our "nonsensical" ideas, they knew best...
Needless to say their equipment never made it into telco networks.
Emphasis on the + in 10+. We still run Nortel Networks gear and they went out of business very shortly after WorldCom declared bankruptcy. That crap is so old that field techs keep pliers handy for card replacements as it's not uncommon for only half the card to come out. A lot of those cards are as large as a 14 inch 4:3 flatscreen monitor, for those who haven't seen any. Some of those cards have been working over 30 years. Quite frankly I'm amazed every time I order a spare and our depot is able to source one. We've been working on replacing Nortel gear with modern equipment so we should stay ahead on spares with decoms, but it's still something that spares are still available almost 25 years after the company went under.
But, there will always be a special place in my heart for Nortel Networks. Shortly after I left the military for the civilian side of life, we commissioned the first Nortel span on our network, and started replacing all the old asynchronous fiber systems like the old AT&T 917s* which could handle 9 DS3S. You might say we started our careers together, and we're going to end them together.
*I THINK it was 917. 30 years ago, and only worked with them for a year before they were replaced.
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