April 2nd, 2007
Comcast money helps open source scare Cisco
With Lucent absorbed into Alcatel, big phone and cable companies have fewer-and-fewer choices.
Cisco is gaining market power over them. Or is it?
This may be a head fake, but Comcast has invested in Vyatta, an open source maker of networking gear. It was just part of an $11 million round, so there's no assurance of big orders, but it should be enough to get Cisco's attention.
Comcast's cable has become a big ISP over the last few years, mainly in the consumer space, and it's running out of addresses. 
It's looking to IPv6 for enough addresses to both run its present operations and crack the business market. It's serious enough to have done PowerPoint and PDF presentations on it, both bearing the names Alain Durand.
It's certain Comcast is serious about IPv6. Is it serious about open source, or is it using the Vyatta investment to get better terms from Cisco or, perhaps, Microsoft?
In the past you would never see a big telecomm player (and that's what Comcast is now) even dally with open source, let alone a relatively-small company. But perhaps times are changing.
There is no win yet, but for the first time open source is in the game for a major telecomm infrastructure project.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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