Remote access heads wholesale.

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Author: McGarvey, Joe

Remote access equipment makers have begun sending the same message to Internet service providers that ISPs have been sending to corporations: Stop buying modems and start concentrating on your business.

In the past few months, several remote access equipment makers have integrated technology into their heavy-duty access gear that enables telecommunications carriers or large ISPs to act as remote access wholesalers.

Recent product announcements of so-called carrier-class equipment from Aptis Communications Inc. (www.aptis.com), Cisco Systems Inc. (www.cisco.com), Lucent Technologies Inc. (www.lucent.com) and others have been specifically designed to appeal to carriers and large service providers, such as UUnet Technologies Inc. (www.uu.net), that are capable of building larger remote access systems that support thousands of simultaneous connections to the Internet. These service providers, the theory goes, can then lease portions of these super points of presence to smaller service providers.

If the wholesaling movement catches on, analysts say, it will provide large ISPs and carriers with another revenue source. Moreover, it will enable smaller ISPs to offer value-added services beyond simple access and save them from making costly remote access equipment purchases.

"This new model would mean that all of the dialup hardware would be supplied by carriers and [large ISPs], and the [smaller] service provider would be free to offer value-added services," says Brad Baldwin, an analyst at research firm International Data Corp.

The value-added offerings that Baldwin sees the ISPs providing include voice and fax service over the Internet and the ability to prioritize traffic.

Equipment makers are going after the wholesale market by building into their equipment features that enable the modems contained in a collection of remote access concentrators, or even a single piece of equipment, to be divided among several service providers. Instead of using a fixed model -- in which specific modems are assigned to a specific service provider -- to divvy up the modems, wholesalers can lease modem ports based on a logical deployment scheme, says Mitchell Auster, business manager of Lucent's Internet products and data networking unit.

For example, Lucent's PortMaster 4 remote access concentrator uses "virtual port" technology to link incoming calls to the next available modem instead of matching the call to a particular set of modems assigned to the Internet subscriber's service provider, Auster says. Information about the type and duration of the call, as well as security information, is monitored by software and fed back to the original service provider, which can bill the subscriber for the appropriate services.

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By Joe McGarvey