Network Infrastructure
Global Crossing plans VoIP service launch for March
By Simon Marshall, Total Telecom
16 February 2001
Global Crossing has finished phase one of its migration to a global VoIP network, and barring any adverse results from tests it collated Friday, will launch wholesale services on 1 March.
The completion of phase one means about 65% of its targeted U.S. TDM traffic has been channeled on to its VoIP backbone, and the next stage will be to deploy Sonus Networks' media gateways in an additional 36 global locations by the end of 2001.
The next one will be a node in Hong Kong, scheduled for completion during the first week in May, bringing the total of launched VoIP gateways to 24 worldwide, with 15 operational in the U.S., seven in Europe and one in Japan.
Longer term, however, Global Crossing will set its sights on being a key 3G backbone provider.
"We will be offering basic VoIP transport to [fixed-line] carriers, which is bread-and-butter revenue for Global Crossing," its director of new initiatives Andy Rawnsley told Total Telecom. "But we're also positioning ourselves to be a provider of [VoIP] capacity between 3G networks," he said.
"We'll also be ideally placed to serve ASPs and ISPs through peering over an H.323 or SIP interface to hand-off traffic to our IP network, and we'll look to do that globally, probably by Q1 2002," he added.
Although Rawnsley said Global Crossing wouldn't achieve any great operational cost savings by migrating to VoIP in terms of bandwidth costs, he said the Bermuda-based company would stick in the meantime to ATM as its chief quality-of-service (QoS) mechanism.
Conventional wisdom has it Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and other traffic engineering standards will manage QoS in IP networks, and not ATM.
"We're breaking the model slightly," he said, "because [although] there are savings to be made in bandwidth utilization, there are also QoS penalties to be paid with MPLS."
"We've chosen to put bucket loads of bandwidth between our network elements [to guarantee QoS], because I don't personally believe these techniques are mature enough to commit our customers' traffic to," he said. |
