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To: JBH who wrote (64)	6/6/1998 8:41:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 173

John, sorry for the late reply... been busy. I've got to thank you for highlighting the AINN story. There are certain aspects to this that I did not catch upon my initial review of the press release, and only saw just now when I entered their web site. They are doing something similar to what Bay has suggested in their recently introduced RFC to the IETF. Bay had introduced this request for comment on their approach to supervising and orchestrating various forms of Internet traffic through the use of their adaptation to SS7 technologies. Prior to this, 3Com and Ascend also entered this central office/PSTN congestion relief space, mounted on with LU and NT Class 5 switching platforms, respectively (might have that one reversed), but they used TCP/IP and ISDN protocols to circumvent the edge network congestion problem, unlike AINN which is using, ready for this? Full-blown, standards-compliant ATM. Each of these approaches uses a technique known as a post switch architecture, which means that once the switch accepts the call instructions, it has a way of detouring it away from the public switched network, and directly to the ISP or other Internent related node. AINN's products supervise dial-in forms of Internet traffic through the use of SS7 by re-directing it over a separate overlay network, but in their case they will be using SS7 to set up the connections which happen to be ATM-based, and not IP-based, to bypass the otherwise affected PSTN segments. In so doing, it is alleviating some of the congestion on the trunks from the end office switch to the ISP node, trunks which heretofore were calculated and sized to handle only those switched voice services on the PSTN that existed prior to the Internet Wave. What I sense as a major departure here, is that they are using SS7 for "all" forms of dial-in Internet traffic supervision that emanate from a treated switch, not only the voice calls over the internet, with VoIP simply thrown in for good measure. Now, that's a switch, and that pun 'was' intended for its instructive quality. This is yet another example in the span of a week's time, in addition to Sprint's declaration to use ATM in their ION Platform, and GDC's 8kbps Voice/ATM product announcement, and LVLT's OC48 ATM (Fore) announcement, that lends new credibility to the oft maligned ATM Model. Are we seeing the beginnings of a major shift here, and a new life being instilled into poor old ATM? It certainly is beginning to look that way to me. But it's still too early to tell for sure. Regards, Frank Coluccio