Always looking for a DSL CPE advantage, Netopia has added easy WLAN installation to the portfolio of services its equipment enables telcos to offer.

by ISP-Planet Staff [December 26, 2003]

You probably know of Netopia as one of several leading manufacturers of DSL CPE. You may not realize that the company dates all the way back to 1986, when it was founded as Farallon. And unless you're an avid follower of the industry, you may not know that it's a real feather in Netopia's hat to be represented by Dano Ybarra, vice president of business development.

Ybarra co-founded Flowpoint, a Netopia competitor, but now works for Netopia. It's part of an industry trend of consolidation. Flowpoint was bought by Cabletron, sold off to Efficient Networks, and then, in 2001, Efficient was bought by German giant Siemens. Ybarra has been with Netopia since July.

He says that although the manufacturing industry is consolidating, innovation has not slowed. "Netopia has cut back, but we've cut back on marketing and sales, not R&D," says Ybarra. That's because Netopia has to cut its prices while raising performance as networking equipment goes through a cycle familiar to any IT buyer.

Recently, the company has been focusing on making the WLAN element of its residential gateways easier to use. Previous CPE did not work well in the residential marketplace. Ybarra says there were many returns of hardware. "There were two reasons for the returns. First, it was tough to setup, and users found they could not install their own WLANs. Second, the reach did not meet expectations, and users returned hardware when they could not use it throughout their homes."

If you're a local ISP, and homes are made of a particular material, you will probably know whether an access point in a home will reach many homes or just one. Ybarra noted that the external appearance of a wall can be deceptive. While concrete or metal walls will obviously block RF, some unexpected materials can be hiding behind simple wooden walls. Apparently, chicken wire has been used to reinforce wooden walls and it can seriously degrade the reach of an access point. In addition, some buildings have particularly thick ceilings and floors, meaning that access points cannot serve more than one floor, while others are mostly wood, which allows RF to pass almost without attenuation.

Carriers are learning to deal with these problems, and as they become comfortable with the basic technology, they are ready to deploy more complex services.

But if carriers are to deploy services, gateways will have to do more. "In the past, carriers deployed dumb modems," says Ybarra. "Now they want to deploy smart devices for lifestyle services."

That would imply that CPE should be getting more expensive. Instead, manufacturers are being told to cut prices, improve performance, and work with ISPs on cutting the ISPs' long term costs.

In May EarthLink told Dave Burstein that testable modems were making support easier. With more intelligence in CPE, the CPE will be able to anticipate problems, call for help, or even solve problems without human intervention. At the moment, a modem that can tell the support desk how well it's performing is already brining significant cost savings.

Also in May, Dave Burstein wrote that new modem chips have "a 150 Mbps MIPS controller delivering NAT, firewall, parental control, web server, and the rest of the gateway functions. A few square centimeters adds wireless and your favorite flavor of telephony."

Netopia understands these savings and is working hard on adding ease of installation. It's part of a trend. Earlier this month, ISP-Planet described the Leus ConnectStack, which also features ease of use and simple home networking.

— End