According to Hirendra Gupta, country manager (India), Lucent Technologies, "APX 8000 is a multi-service access switch with twice the port density the other such products available in the market." Its "universal port" capability enables the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and carriers to support the growth of new residential and business access technologies and services.

According to International Data Corporation (IDC), the combined market for carrier-type dial-up Internet access and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is expected to grow from $3.7 billion in 1999 to $6.7 billion by 20003.The APX 8000 helps ISPs and other carriers capitalise on fast-growing markets for dial access, voice, or fax over the Internet and virtual private Networks (VPNs). It also makes it easy for the ISP to do port wholesaling (reselling or leasing the ports to other smaller ISPs.

The cost of an APX 8000 varies from $200-$400 per port, depending on configuration. It is a high capacity product, which in terms of concurrent Internet usage can support up to 2600 ports (or approx 26,000 users) in the same box. And it is scalable, so ISPs can service up to 80,000 connections using the same box, "which is twice what any competitor can do today", says Kevin Wade, product marketing manager, InterNetowrking Systems, Lucent Technologies. APX 8000 has a full redundancy system (a back-up for all the systems inside the device) that makes carrier class equipment very reliable.

This is very crucial if you are supporting many users, and have to ensure that the system does not crash, adds Lucent's marketing manager for South East Asia, Rajinder Singh. To complement APX 8000, which is a high end product, the company has also launched MAX 3000, a similar product for the B and the C category of ISPs. Essentially a remote access concentrator (users connect to these through dial-up systems).

According to Wade, MAX3 is very easy-to-use, cost effective system, scalable that gives small ISPs all they need, but cuts down on the frills and the extra features they might not need. MAX3, which costs around $13000, can handle up to 600 users (it has 60 ports). While, it does not have the redundancy component, which APX 8000 has, ISPs wanting to get that feature can put two MAX 3000s together, added Wade.

To enable the ISPs and other service providers to manage their services, Lucent also launched NaviAccess 5.0. It is a next generation network management platform for access services - including analog, ISDN, VoIP, frame relays, and DSL - enables the network operators to not just manage their devices, but also the services they provide to the customers by giving them a business-level view of their networks." It uses a call mapping mechanism, which identifies every call to the Lucent remote access server and associates it with a specific service group or customer.

It gives the ISP real time view of all the services being delivered on the network, thereby enabling them to monitor and deliver priority services.The CORBA-based, multi-server architecture of NavisAccess 5.0 is scalable enough to support over one million multi-service access ports on a single system.