three tiersfor 3com <gg>
October 21, 1998 CTI News via NewsEdge Corporation -- Santa
Clara, Calif.-based 3Com Corp. [COMS]
yesterday (10/19) announced the latest
advance in its ongoing Voice-over-IP
initiative: the industry's first three-tier
carrier-class IP telephony architecture,
which the company will demonstrate this
week at the Networld+Interop trade show in
Atlanta.
This modular, standards-based turnkey
system supports phone-to- phone and
PC-to-phone IP-based telephony over
packet-switched networks.
The new carrier-class IP telephony system is
based on a three- tier architecture of
gateways, gatekeepers and back-end
servers, interconnected by open
standards-based protocols. All three
components now are available for customer
trials, and will be generally available in early
1999. Pricing will be configuration dependent,
the base of which is undetermined.
The 3Com architecture features standard
APIs at every level to allow carriers the
flexibility to customize the system,
facilitating service differentiation and
integration of back-to-back office
applications.
VoIP Gateways provide seamless access to
the IP network. Voice calls are digitized,
encoded, compressed and packetized in an
originating gateway; and then,
decompressed, decoded and reassembled in
the destination gateway. Gateways are
interconnected with the PSTN when
appropriate to ensure the solution is
ubiquitous.
Gateway processing of the audio stream
traversing an IP network is transparent to
users. From the caller's perspective, the
experience is very similar to using a
telephone calling card. Callers dial into a
gateway using a standard telephone by
dialing an access number.
Upon authentication of the calling party, the
caller dials the desired number and hears the
usual ringing tones until the call is answered
at the far end. The caller and the called
party experience a "typical" telephone call.
"3Com comes to market with several
strengths, not the least of which is its
embedded base of total control platforms
which are software upgradeable to handle
VoIP. This announcement is important not
just for 3Com, but for the industry as a
whole - the demand for carrier-scale
products is overwhelming, " says Hilary Mine,
vice president of Cedar Knolls, N.J.-based
Probe Research Inc.
Based on 3Com's Total Control multiservice
access platform, the new carrier-class VoIP
system is standards-based and supports
international protocols including the ITU
T.120 and H.323v2 specifications. The
system uses G.711, G.723.1 and G.729a
voice encoding to ensure compatibility with
global telephony systems.
In addition to voice, the platform will provide
extensive support for facsimile and video
services.
(Hilary Mine, Probe Research, 916/989-1008,
proberesearch.com; Steven M.
Plavny, 3Com, 847/262-1329,
3com.com.)
[Copyright 1998, Phillips Publishing] |
