Summary
1. While the Infinera box seems to be overkill for very small telcos, what does the supplier have to lose? 2. Other vendors in the past, such as ADC (albeit a connector company), have been pleasantly surprised by the amount of business produced in this space. 3. The fact that it is a switching and transport platform may have some appeal in this market.
Analysis
At least for some suppliers, there has been value in the time invested in the RUS process.
Certainly, Infinera would have no chance at all of penetrating the lower-tier service providers in the US without that certification. Those are the rules of the game with carriers getting federal subsidies. So, in addition to the Infinera solution being NEBS-compliant, to whatever extent these operators have a need for 2 ½-Gig or GigE service pipes, the supplier has the potential to participate there in being able to accommodate the switching function as well as the transport piece.
While there is no guarantee of business because a manufacturer gets RUS-qualified, at least Infinera is available if the opportunity arises – for these telcos to bid on the company. And although the capacity of Infinera’s offering is very large, the supplier can sell the shelf to an RLEC for a small amount of money to get the base footprint started in locations – and then management can be done on a DLM or XLM basis. So, in this case, one is not talking about four total cards in a shelf for the chassis – but it can easily deploy a single-slot version just to do core switching for rural applications – and connect to the DWDM side as well. Therefore, depending on how it is priced out, it can be done – based on the type of pricing Infinera may be willing to offer as a loss leader. The vendor has made that pitch in the past – deploying shelves at next to nothing to get in the network and try to make it up on TAMs.
