Enterprise, carrier voice-over-IP goes embedded
Sat Mar 25 00:24:00 EST 2000
Mar. 24, 2000 (Electronic Engineering Times - CMP via COMTEX) -- SAN JOSE,
CALIF. - The movement to drive voice traffic over the Internet Protocol will
surge forward at this week's Voice on the Networks conference here, with the
launch of products that range from carrier-class systems for the central office
to home and office devices aimed at replacing the venerable circuit-switched
private branch exchange.
The companies set to show their wares at the event include familiar players in
embedded telephony, such as enterprise computer-telephony expert Natural
Microsystems Inc. GNP Computers Inc., a familiar name in carrier-grade telephony
servers, will also introduce products. And Shoreline Communications Inc.
(Sunnyvale, Calif.) will be first to fulfill the promises made by the likes of
Cisco Systems Inc. and Lucent Technologies Inc. for a PBX replacement Internet
Protocol (IP) architecture for LAN infrastructure. The company will launch
systems scaling from home telecommuters to 24-port PBX killers.
The Voice on the Networks (VON) conference is also the area of activity where
soft-switch coalitions will take center stage (see story, page 1). There is more
than the VON tie holding the two realms together, as both Shoreline president
John Fazio and Natural Microsystems chief technology officer Brough Turner
attested when they pointed to soft-switch architectures as the "end game"
driving their current voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) plans.
Natural Microsystems (NMS; Framingham, Mass.) has been moving toward more direct
board-level competition with the likes of AudioCodes Ltd. and Brooktrout
Technology Inc., as its board business becomes more IP-centric and more focused
on CompactPCI (CPCI).
This week the company will introduce its carrier-class VoIP products, the
Convergence Generation series. Turner predicted that the CG6000C board, in
particular, will be unchallenged in offering 240 VoIP ports per slot for IP
media gateway applications.
Turner said that a move toward carrier-grade boards appropriate for
NEBS-hardened equipment was a natural extension of NMS' interest in CPCI. By
offering products appropriate for Solaris or NT servers, the CG family will
allow extremely dense fanout of VoIP channels from the central office to
enterprise sites, making such servers an ideal adjunct for soft-switch
architectures, Turner said. NMS already offers Fusion, a PC server-based
development environment that is being extended to media gateway applications.
And its Signaling System 7 boards for traditional circuit-switched networks
complement the new CG family for native IP transport of voice.
NMS will be making staged rollouts of quality-of-service software features to
augment the IP hardware. At the VON show, the company will introduce
PolicyPoint, a means of establishing QoS policy that works in gateway
architectures in conjunction with products from recently acquired Qwes.com. For
monitoring applications, PolicyPoint will also work in conjunction with
PacketMedia, a suite of IP media server applications the company introduced in
February.
While the enterprise board-level specialists are moving up to carrier IP
applications, central-office expert GNP is linking up with partners to spin
ready-made media gateway platforms. GNP (Monrovia, Calif.) has teamed with Blue
Wave Systems Inc. and Artesyn Communication Products Inc. to create a CPCI
system for media gateway control (Megaco) OEM products. GNP has dubbed its core
architecture the Alpha 4.
Roger Baar, president and CEO of GNP, said that the platform is meant to be a
broader telephony development vehicle than the OEM Megaco products offered by
vendors such as Radisys Inc.
Baar said that many customers were asking for more ready-to-roll solutions for
VoIP gateways and more general-purpose Megaco architectures. Consequently, GNP
sought help from Blue Wave Systems on DSP support, using the C6400 board based
on the Texas Instruments TMS320C6201 DSP processor. Artesyn provided the
BajaSpan board, which combines eight T1/E1 spans with an H.110 bus interface. A
special time-slot interchanger on the Artesyn board allows any T1 or E1 time
slot to be routed to or from any of the H.110 bus' 4,096 time slots.
Customers can configure the basic Alpha 4 CPCI platform with Sun Microsystems'
SparcEngine boards rated at 333, 360 or 440 MHz. The Blue Wave board can be
configured with four floating-point (C6201) or four fixed-point (C6701) DSPs.
The Alpha 4 system supports CPCI hot-swap features, which Baar called critical
in the high-availability apps most gateways serve.
Killing the PBX
In the enterprise applications sector, Shoreline Communications will formally
introduce an IP architecture it claims is capable of finally slaughtering the
mighty PBX. Executives from the startup said they've been shipping systems to
key carriers for more than a year, but the company elected to keep a low profile
until two generations of products had been introduced. President John Fazio said
the initial low-key stance was due to the many unfulfilled promises made by
startups in the mediation-switch and enterprise IP voice markets.
Shoreline considers itself primarily a software company centered on effective
VoIP application development within a Wind River Systems kernel environment. The
company hopes to have a full soft-switch product suite by the second half. But
for now, the delivery of the full Distributed Internet Voice Architecture (Diva)
mandates Shoreline's own development of an analog-to-channelized-IP gateway that
the company calls the ShoreGear IPBX.
The original IPBX was a 12-port system that linked to enterprise Ethernet
switches. At VON, Shoreline will augment that system with 24-port boxes intended
for direct links to legacy circuit-switched PBXes, and compact four-port IPBX
systems intended for home use by telecommuters. All will feature enhanced
parallel DSP architectures to handle more ports of voice compression.
Shoreline requires its own resident software in NT servers in the enterprise.
The software currently turns the servers into voice application delivery
vehicles for the Ethernet switches and IPBXes that make up the network. In the
next release of software, the NT servers also will serve as locations for the
Shoreline soft-switch service-creation elements.
Fazio said that the real software advantage the Diva architecture will offer may
not be in its transition to a soft-switch environment, but in its move to
telephony-like applications that enterprise LAN users have not been able to
access. For example, Shoreline will introduce network call routing to allow IP
telephony over a corporate WAN, using a dial-9, Centrex-like feature to allow
the equivalent of long-distance calls.
Later this year, Diva systems will be augmented with ISDN primary-rate features,
emergency-911 call capabilities and Simple Network Management Protocol agents
that reside in voice switches.
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