Ascend Joins Push To Add Voice-Over-IP to
Hardware
By Todd Spangler
Ascend Communications will announce its IP telephony strategy this week,
marking the networking hardware vendor's late but promising arrival to that
market.
Ascend's MultiVoice architecture, which will integrate H.323-compatible fax
and voice services in the company's IP, ATM, and frame relay products,
follows similar announcements from competitors 3Com Corp., Cisco Systems
Inc., and Bay Networks Inc.
Analysts predicted that though late to market, Ascend's products will fare well
among service providers--not only because of the company's large installed
base in that market, but also because Ascend's MultiVoice products are more
comprehensive than other offerings.
"They have a stronger proposition than competitors like 3Com because they
also have core switches, which can provide end-to-end QoS [quality of
service]," said Francois de Repentigny, a Frost & Sullivan analyst.
Frost & Sullivan projects that worldwide sales of telephony gateway
equipment will grow from $47.3 million in 1997 to $3.2 billion in 2002, and
de Repentigny said most of that revenue will come from the integrated
gateways of networking vendors like Ascend, rather than from the standalone
gateways of companies like VocalTec or NetSpeak.
Ascend will ship MultiVoice for MAX, the company's family of
high-port-density access routers, next month. The products will include
Ascend MAX 6000 routers preconfigured with 16 to 96 telephony ports,
priced between $677 and $750 per port, as well as upgrade software and 8-
to 16-port modules for its MAX 4000 routers. The MultiVoice Access
Manager, a Windows NT 4.0 application that provides H.323 gatekeeper
functions, will also ship next month, priced from $3,000 for a four-gateway
bundle.
Ascend will also announce this week that by mid-1998, its core network
switches will support QoS routing for voice, via its IP Navigator Layer 3
routing software option.
"What service providers are looking for is a carrier-class way to provide
end-to-end voice services," said Peter Joy, an Ascend product marketing
manager. "We're the first one to really bring together the different pieces of the
network to do that." PSINet, which hopes to begin offering voice-over-IP
service, has been testing MultiVoice for about three months, said Mark
Fedor, PSINet vice president of engineering.
"We're familiar with the Ascend products, so they've come out high on our
list," he said. "They've done some interesting things to help productize
voice-over-IP services." |
