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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Phoenix who wrote (32320)	2/15/2000 11:10:00 AM
From: Techplayer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 77399

Startup Will Create Voice-Over-Broadband (02/14/00, 6:06 p.m. ET) By Loring Wirbel, EE Times DENVER -- The executive team from Cisco Systems has moved on toform a new company. This is the same team that in 1996founded NetSpeed (Austin, Texas), a digital subscriber line (DSL) company that was then acquired by Cisco in 1998. At startup General Bandwidth they will explore a new area of telephony, where DSL multiplexers meet old-fashioned voice switches. General Bandwidth is taking elements from voice-over-SL gateway architectures, mediation packet/circuit switches, and time-division multiplexed circuit backbones to create what company chief executive Brendon Mills calls a "voice-over-broadband" gateway architecture. The startup is entering carrier markets in an alternative direction to the mainstream DSL access multiplexer and VoDSL gateway vendors. Residential customers are the primary market for its G6 Broadband Gateway. General Bandwidth is trying to sell the G6 to incumbent local carriers and established European PTTs , rather than to the new competitive carriers that form the heart of the DSL access multiplexer customer base. "We hope to show the most flexible platform for multiplexing packetized voice over broadband links," Mills said. Interface choices The company plans to support analog plain old telephone service (POTS) "lifeline" services through a special analog line card in its asynchronous transfer mode-based system, providing what Mills called "packetized POTS" to residential customers. It is offering a choice of advanced interfaces, such as Signaling System 7, Megaco/Media Gateway Control Protocol, and GR-303 in order to talk with most circuit-based systems in all telephone networks. General Bandwidth has a two-pronged effort for turning the G6 gateway into a bona fide "soft switch." In the short term, the company will partner with a Megaco soft-switch company to offer soft-switch functions outside its own platform. Within two years, however, the company plans to develop a soft-switch programmable engine that resides on ASICs and switches fabric chips on a line card inside the G6. General Bandwidth said it hopes to attract cable television multisystem operators and broadband wireless carriers to its system.