Voice-over-IP services set to
flourish
By Scott Berinato, PC Week Online
03.13.98 5:16 pm ET
Enterprise administrators and service
providers will have no shortage of options in
deploying voice-over-IP services in the
coming months.
Networking heavyweights Ascend Communications Inc., Lucent
Technologies Inc. and Cabletron Systems Inc. all have strategies and
access hardware on tap aimed squarely at voice over IP, which
promises huge cost savings for wide area communications.
Ascend at the end of this month will trumpet a voice-over-IP strategy
that includes new Voice Gateway hardware and the Ascend MAX
6000 as key platforms.
The Voice Gateway will have a DSP (digital-signal processor)
architecture for downloading quality-of-service software and voice
capabilities onto the card, according to sources close to the company.
The Voice Gateway will give the MAX platform cards that are initially
optimized for either voice or data but will not support different services
on a port-by-port basis. Support for "any service on any port at any
time" will come at a later date, the sources said.
3Com with its Total Control access hardware and Lucent with its new
PortMaster 4 (see below) are claiming port-by-port support for either
voice or data.
Ascend's MAX 6000, the Alameda, Calif., company's next-generation
entry into the access market, has been described by several sources as a
"souped-up MAX 4000." Like the 4000, it will provide four T-1
connections per device.
The 6000 adds processing power and service capabilities--such as
voice over IP--not found in its predecessor. Also, the new access
concentrator can be stacked several units high and managed as one
logical device on a rack, the sources said.
"It's a good product. Ascend has a lot to be proud of," said one source
familiar with the hardware. "But it's not competing with the really
high-end devices with more than 10 T-1s."
Lucent next week will debut just such a concentrator, the PortMaster 4,
which was developed by Livingston Enterprises Inc., a company Lucent
acquired last year.
PortMaster 4 will provide 864 digital modem connection in its
15.75-inch, 10-slot chassis. A 7-foot rack will accommodate 4,320
connections, or 180 T-1 lines. It has an embedded 5G-bps
asynchronous transfer mode switching fabric, officials said.
Some of the hallmarks of a carrier-class device--fault tolerance,
hot-swappability, redundancy and advanced billing--are included. Also,
each port on the PortMaster 4 can detect and support any service
coming into the concentrator. When combined with policy-based
management, this will help carriers to flexibly support voice-over-IP
service. If ports have to be predefined for either voice or data, an
administrator would be limited, industry observers said.
However, Lucent's new carrier access device is missing support in two
key areas: NEBS-3 compliance and SS7 protocol support. NEBS-3 is
a set of standards used by carriers to guarantee that a device will be
physically capable of being deployed in their networks. The SS7
protocol provides value-added voice services such as call waiting and
voice mail on a separate network to prevent congestion.
Lucent is working to support both NEBS and SS7 on the device,
according to company officials in Murray Hill, N.J.
Asked if adding NEBS compliance to a carrier-class remote access
concentrator is important, Maribel Lopez, an analyst with Forrester
Research Inc., in Cambridge, Mass., said, "Yes, but it's like adding a
new shell to a car. You end up redesigning everything to fit in that shell."
PortMaster 4 is expected to ship in May for $519 per port.
Cabletron, meanwhile, will focus on office-to-office voice over IP when
it announces a strategy on May 1.
Currently, Cabletron resells Northern Telecom Ltd.'s Passport access
concentrator for multiple T-1 connections between offices. The
Rochester, N.H., company is working with Nortel to scale down the
performance and cost of the Passport for medium-size offices that need
six to 24 voice-over-IP lines to other offices.
Such a device would likely plug into Cabletron's SmartSwitch 9000 or
6000, officials said. |
