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Drano For Clogged Networks
Salvatore Salamone
A common telco refrain: Data clogs the public switched network.
After all, those networks were designed to handle calls of fairly short duration-at least in contrast to some Web surfing connections. And now they have to deal with all the users dialing into the Internet and tying up telco switch capacity all day long.
One way around this sore spot is, well, to go around it.
To that end, Xcom Technologies Inc., a regional competitive local exchange carrier, took a step to off-load some of this nasty data traffic by bypassing a major bottleneck in today's telecom-centric public switched networks.
Xcom last week demonstrated its Enterprise Digital Switch 4500 (EDS 4500), an open architecture switching platform that alleviates switch congestion by bypassing a telco's central office switch.
Once deployed in networks such as Xcom's, IT managers will likely reap some performance benefits. "Bypass is a good alternative for handling central office switches getting overwhelmed with data traffic," said Raymond Lopez, a consultant at Rosewall and Associates, a consulting firm that designs and installs remote access systems.
But Lopez cautions that much of the benefits of congestion relief will be hard for the user to notice. "This is two steps down the food chain for the IT manager," he said. But he also noted that if ISPs and competitive local exchange carriers do not adopt these methods, the user would see the opposite effect-performance degradation.
Xcom's approach keeps the data off the telco central office switches but leverages the intelligence in the public switched telephone network (PSTN), such as Signaling System 7, along with proprietary Xcom software to separate data and voice traffic. "You don't have to layer data or fax on top of voice," said Shawn Lewis, Xcom's vice president of technology services and chief operating officer. "Don't force switches to do things they are not good at."
Xcom's approach would take fax traffic and hand it off to a fax server, for example, rather than passing it through a central office switch.
Xcom is already working with Ascend Communications on ways to leverage Xcom's bypass technology so ISPs and corporate customers can take advantage of the potential new services that the technology can support.
The heart of Xcom's bypass technology is the intelligent link with the PSTN through SS7. If a user picks up a phone, that connection could be handled by the Ascend TNT and passed onto the PSTN. But if the user were to connect to a data network, the call would be handled at the IP layer and directed without going through the telco central office.
Xcom said new services would be possible by leveraging the intelligent call handling of SS7. For instance, an ISP might use Xcom's technology and network to send an alert automatically to an online DSL user that someone is trying to call and is getting a busy signal.
Copyright (c) 1997 CMP Media Inc. |
