djane,
I spent more than just a little time examining ASND's entire product line the other day, everything from their pipelines to their 550 boxes for a carrier-connected application. I was impressed with their attention, and the attention that all of the big router/switching vendors, are devoting to voice over IP. although, some of them (ascend in this case) are making some claims regarding end-to-end QoS/CoS, which I find a bit difficult to digest, because it assumes either one of three things (or both):
(1) everyone, i.e., all ISPs and carriers are using their gear, or (2) everyone is adhering to the standards, or
(3) a signle contiguous network fabric would be used as in by a single carrier, end to end.
Problem is, none of these are likely to be the case any time soon, in a heterogenous environment, where phone to phone long distance is concerned.
3Com and Cisco are also making hefty claims, and then there is the preceding post on Bay. I find a lot of language on SS7 and QoS throughout all of this, but very little that addresses gatekeeper functions, E.164 addressing, or multi-point conferencing and broadcast/multicast features, all of which are being refined by the VoIP Forum. But, none of which appears in the press. What does all of this mean?
In fact, ASND comes right out and states that their remote access devices now assume the roles of VoIP gateways. That should give some of the pure-play gateway companies cause for concern, wouln't you think? I've also read where Ascend is now partnering with one of the VoIP application houses, eFusion. It's heating up.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
