Val, the article is mainly focused on the internal office networks, RACE's products address full-function remote connectivity to these internal networks.
"Finally, there is an emerging class of products known as IP PBXs. These use VOIP routing to match phone numbers to IP destinations, replacing centralized PBX circuit switching with end-to-end packet switching. Conventional phones and PBXs are attached to router or server ports, or IP telephones are attached to network workstations."
>>>"Your RACE products can't do that - routing to the VPN or local PBX is essential."
RACE's products aren't designed to be used internally. A VocalWare call would go straight to the PBX first just as any other incoming call would where it would be routed to the appropriate extension or outbound line and the reverse applies as well. Granted, they haven't specifically said that an incoming call could head straight for a specific IP address but then again they haven't outlined all the features of the new servers yet either.
""Packets, frames, and cells come in all sizes, and on slow links larger ones will delay the voice transmission. So all voice technologies reduce the size of the data element: IP packets are fragmented, while other protocols are limited to a smaller MTU (maximum transmission unit) size. "Another source of jitter is network congestion caused by bursts of data traffic. Vendors offer various COS solutions to combat this and keep voice flowing, such as proprietary queuing, WFQ (weighted fair queuing), IP precedence, and RSVP (resource reservation protocol). Still, congestion is more of an issue on WAN links. Net managers could help themselves here by following up with the vendor."
>>>"What does that does that say for RACE's ESP technology? If it's only an issue over LANs then what problem did Ben solve?"
I think it's all in here:
"DATA RACE has invented a new, improved protocol, called Escape Sequence Protocol (ESP), which operates at a very low level in the protocol stack, and can interleave voice frames as short as 10 milliseconds with data packets without degrading the voice or significantly reducing the data throughput. The Escape Sequence Protocol, which lies below the existing interface used by data applications, performs this interleaving function transparently and quickly, making VoIP a reality with today's computers and applications.
DATA RACE has designed this last mile solution to connect to the
fast-emerging world of VoIP on the backbone. Hardware or software in the remote client (the end user PC) uses ESP to interleave the voice frames into the data stream over the last mile dial-up link. At the Point of Presence (or POP, the server into which the user's modem has connected), software extracts the voice frames, leaving the data stream untouched. The voice frames are repackaged into VoIP packets which can be routed over the backbone, or the telephony can be split out at the POP and routed over the existing conventional telephone network. In either case, this technology can, for the first time, offer the remote (end) user simultaneous business-quality telephony and data (and even network FAX) over a single dial-up line."
"But voice-over-data equipment also adds latency: End-systems take time to digitize voice signals, and they must add "dejitter" buffering delay to compensate for any variable delay remaining in the system. That can add up to as much as 80 ms.
>>>"Oops, another probelm for RACE they need to decode and redigitze voice if they need to send it over a H.323 compliant network - unless they have a proprietary protocol - but then your stuck with their crap at all the nodes."
Again - we still don't know if they've somehow included the H.323 standards into the new servers, then this explanation of ESP is regarding using it for a totally different application. |
