ASND works on voice equipments, Part II
Recall that it is SS7 and centralized databases that allow you to
do geographic and time-based routing of phone calls. If your
New York office were closed, then all calls would be routed to
your California office, which would still be open. The same would
be true of IP-based telephony calls. The need for similar routing
is clearly there.
When MCI launched its Vault capability last year, if you
squinted at the architecture schematics, you could see dotted
lines from the IP switching layer to the SS7 data access points
in the MCI architecture.
This was really the first public play for serious integration of
data networking with voice networking because it was being
done on more than just a transport layer.
As you see telcos such as GTE preparing to do battle with
extensive nationwide IP networks, a critical piece has to be SS7
integration.
Still, achieving SS7 and data network integration won't be a
trivial task. For example, data networks, and the Internet in
particular, handle calls in fundamentally different ways. There
are a lot of neat features that carriers have developed over time,
such as routing by area code, that will be tough to carry over to
the data environment.
But then there are features that reside in the data network that
should work easily in an SS7-data network environment. For
example, look-ahead routing, which scouts forward in the
network for congestion and busy signals, should work well.
After all, SS7 is a packet network that talks to all the switches
and other network adjunct devices. |
