Darren et al,
Here is an interesting news item from NewsPage from Individual that reinforces the direction the industry is taking. I do not want to discount the short term window that exists for proprietary solutions, especially in the enterprise tie line replacement business, but the article is further evidence that there is going to be a strong need for interoperability between vendors, probably sooner than we all thought, rather than later. Translation: If I initiate a VoIP call from my remote access connection when I dial into Compuserve, or wherever, I want to be able to complete that call to "anywhere." Comments are welcome.
Frank Coluccio
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"voice-over-ip services set to flourish"
March 16, 1998
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. |
