This article is pretty technicle, but the important part for me is the bold part
Cisco moves packetized voice into the enterprise
By Loring Wirbel, EE Times
Sep 14, 1999 (1:24 PM)
URL: eetimes.com
SAN JOSE, Calif. ? Cisco Systems Inc.'s five-phased strategy to integrate packetized voice into data
networks made a leap into the enterprise on Monday (Sept. 13), when the company introduced a variety of
switches, small routers, and call gateways under its AVVID (Architecture for Voice, Video, and Integrated
Data) initiative. Utilizing voice over Internet Protocol hardware technology from earlier WAN efforts, as well
as client phones acquired from Selsius Inc., Cisco is offering its first voice integration products applicable
to enterprise customers. Mario Mazzola, senior vice president of the enterprise line of business at Cisco,
said that the company now has over 1,000 developers working on voice processing in various divisions at
Cisco. The enterprise work leverages earlier "jukebox DSP" concepts for voice packetization, as well as
advances made for call-processing services, dubbed Symphony, in the Internetworking Operating System
(IOS). This is the first time that the technology has been ported to such enterprise switches as the
Catalyst 2900, 4000, 5000, 6000 and 8500 series, however.
Jayshree Ullal, vice president of marketing in the enterprise group, said there was more to the AVVID effort
than the 35 new product lines with voice packetization capabilities. Cisco also has launched a dedicated
mission-critical call server platform called the Media Convergence Server 7830, intended as a
high-availability Pentium III-based platform for call-manager software. Multiple server platforms can be
linked via H.323 interfaces, though enterprise voice product manager Dave Buster said that the work did
not end with H.323 gateway functions.
"We have been working on the different functionality available under H.323, MGCP [Media Gateway
Control Protocol], and Megaco definitions of a gateway, and we'll have full call agent software available for
all environments," Buster said.
In essence, the rollout of AVVID completes the five-phase program for voice integration that Cisco
announced two years ago, although the Phase V policy-management functions still require some fleshing
out in software capabilities for quality-of-service features. The most exciting phase, product managers
agreed, was bringing Selsius Internet Protocol (IP) phones into the enterprise product suite, as well as
planning for a PC-based SoftPhone function which Cisco will offer as a client software package by the end
of the year.
The early customer interest in the packetized desk-set phones has been better than good ? it's been
fanatical, product managers said, and has led Cisco to warn users that some call feature applications are
still in beta phase. Kurt Eckles, director of broadband access marketing at Texas Instruments Inc., said
his group had received IP phones in the past few weeks and "it's so much better than circuit phones, I
want to get one for my home."
The key to bringing in legacy circuit services and coexisting with PBXs, executives said, is to give
customers a choice as to where the call-processing function is carried out. Cisco will sell voice-enabled
routers, voice-enabled switches, traditional digital gateways, and the MCS-7830 server with circuit-call
aggregation and packetization capable of being performed at any point in the network.
Martin deBeer, director of multiservice solutions, said that the ability to choose codecs for scaled voice
quality should convince customers to replace circuit PBXs. A PBX is limited to carrying voice over 64-kbit
channels with a G.711 codec, he said, while a packet phone can use G.723.1 at 6.3 kbits/second, G.729a
at 8 kbits/s, traditional G.711, or wideband high-quality voice using the G.722 codec, scaling from 64 to
256 kbits/s.
The processing functions use the Cisco Call Manager software, which operates as a traditional
client-server package on a mission-critical server, rather than as a master-slave application seen in circuit
PBXs. This allows a range of circuit-like call features, as well as IP-enabled packet features like integrated
e-mail and voice messages.
For embedded gateways, Cisco is offering PCI cards, controlled by the Call Manager and running H.323
v2, which can support 30 voice channels over an E1 line or 24 over a T1 line. The point in the breadth of
AVVID hardware, Ullal said, is not to assume that networks will be packet-based for all voice services, but
to make sure that "the packetized infrastructure absorbs the existing traffic over time." |
