From the March 22, 1999 issue of Telephony Magazine, at:
internettelephony.com
"IP interoperability continues slow march"
Brian Quinton
Worldwide Internet protocol carrier IDT said last week that its Net2Phone
voice-over-IP product is completely interoperable with InterXpress gateways, the
IP voice and data suite from Siemens Information and Communications
Networks.
"This was our first test of interoperability with Siemens," said David Greenblatt,
IDT's chief operating officer. "We ascertained that we can pass traffic between
Net2Phone and Siemens gateways. We can route, rate and settle traffic and
monitor their gateways—basically, do everything you need to do to run a
network."
The test, performed at IDT's labs, sent traffic between the IDT network and
switches of the InterXpress 2000 series. That platform employs a 3Com hub to
provide voice, fax and data connectivity among IP networks, or between IP
networks and the public network.
"We recognize the need to give our customers a choice and to avoid locking
them into proprietary solutions," said a Siemens spokesman.
To date, IDT has built most of its own IP gateways—though it does not sell them
to other IP carriers—and has done interoperability testing with a few
manufacturers' switches. "Interoperability is a time-consuming challenge,"
Greenblatt said. " It's something you want to do with the vendors that are going
to bring you the minutes. "
These Siemens interoperability results may lead IDT to buy gateways from the
vendor at some later date, but that decision has not been made, Greenblatt said.
For now it's enough to know that Net2Phone works well over the InterXpress
product suite. "We got one thing done, we did it well and it's looking great," he
said. "But this certainly may lead to future cooperation with them."
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