More than 10 years ago, I had dinner on a press junket at a very sophisticated German country club. In total, the meal covered almost a dozen courses with the waiter explaining each element as it was brought to the table. To my surprise, the beef tongue wasn't too bad so long as you could get over those taste buds staring at you. The same could not be said of the German version of Rocky Mountain oysters that came next. What made the meal most memorable, though, was the comment from a fellow press member, who asked, "Now that we've had the ends of the animal, you think we'll get any part of the middle?"

In all the hype surrounding Cisco's acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta, it's hard not to think that perhaps everyone is jumping the gun just a little bit. In announcing that Cisco would shell out $6.9 billion (actually closer to $5 billion when SA's cash is taken into account, but what's a couple of billion between friends?) both companies talked a lot about the end-to-end capabilities they will have as a result. True, SA's got a pretty good name in the headend and at the set-top; and Cisco certainly knows the routers portion of the network. But aren't they forgetting about that little portion in the middle called access? You know, where the DSLAMs, ONT, OLTs, BLCs and other acronyms fit?

When an analyst raised that issue on a conference call billed as the "technical overview" of the merger, Mike Volpi, senior vice president for Cisco, essentially waved it off by noting that telcos and cable operators have more or less chosen their access vendors and technologies. Moreover, there wasn't much any vendor could do to differentiate access.

What's makes that statement intriguing, aside from being pure hogwash, is that Cisco is indeed interested in an access play. It just hasn't made its move yet. Less than a year ago, several executives within the service provider organization were openly discussing how to get into the DSLAM/BLC market via acquisition. The issue, and the element of truth in Volpi's statement, was that dislodging an incumbent access vendor at a big carrier is only slightly easier than getting rid of one in Congress. That's still true, but given the rapid change and evolution coming to the access market, particularly as fiber-to-the-premises and VDSL2 hits their strides, don't think that Cisco buying SA was the whole enchilada. It was just the appetizer.