SSUE #2 WEDNESDAY 25 MARCH 1998
Ascend Offers Fastpath To Full
Service VoIP
By Phil Jones
As Cisco maps out stage three in its five phase
multi-media integration strategy, Ascend said it is going
straight for the issue of the moment with voice over IP
(VoIP) and voice over ATM extensions to its MAX
access concentrator range.
Ascend will not officially announce MultiVoice IP
Gateway until next week, but the company has begun
demonstrating the product to prospective customers at
CeBit in Hanover. According to Mark Purdom, Ascend's
European corporate marketing manager, interest has
been intense. "Service providers love it. This is the
technology that allows them [new carriers and ISPs] to
compete with the big boys," he said.
Latent demand for carrier-class VoIP infrastructure may
be growing fast, but Ascend is pitching MultiVoice into a
rapidly filling market where competition is set to be
fierce. As Purdom conceded, "The hardware market
[for VoIP access] is getting pretty synonymous.
Everyone has high-end concentrator." Ascend claims
MultiVoice will arrive in an easy to implement form, and
with all the available public standards in place.
In practice MultiVoice will appear first as an extension to
the MAX 6000 access concentrator, Ascend's latest
high-end product. This immediately differentiates
Ascend's VoIP approach from other vendors, who have
tended to offer VoIP as a standalone or low-end
extension, with a promise of scalability to come.
On the MAX 6000, MultiVoice will support 96 voice
channels, rising to 672 in later versions.
However, "service providers are not going to buy it
because of port density, it's what you can do with it
which will influence purchasing decisions." In this
respect Ascend has taken the ambitious step of
offering a comprehensive range of VoIP service
management features, ahead of the completion of the
public standards now being developed under the
European Telecoms Standards Institute's Tiphon
programme.
Under Tiphon, vendors are looking to base standards
for VoIP call authentication, addressing and billing
using the nascent RAS protocol, which is part of the
H.323 multimedia interoperability standard. Ascend
says its MultiVoice Access Manager suite is
H.323-based and supports RAS. It also uses the E.164
specification to terminate calls across the PSTN.
The Tiphon work is unlikely to be completed this year
however, so in offering a comprehensive set quality of
service (QoS) features, Ascend is running ahead of the
public standard process. Nevertheless, in practical
terms, the company's approach does offer a potentially
faster track to full VoIP tiered services than rivals, such
as Cisco, who are adopting more of a phase approach.
Purdom said MAX 4000 users, who constitute the bulk
of Ascend's customers, will not be forced to upgrade to
MAX 6000 to employ MultiVoice. "They will need new
software, but it will be distributed free to our installed
base" he said. |
