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Technology Stocks : Lucent Technologies (LU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pat mudge who wrote (4812)	10/25/1998 9:07:00 AM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 21876

Lucent Targets Internet Telephony Providers Lucent Technologies is looking to become a force in the emerging Internet telephony market with its new PacketStar IP Services Platform (PIPSP). The Murray Hill, N.J.-based company will use its Bell Labs-developed software to allow gateways from different vendors to operate with each other and with traditional telephone networks. Catherine Trebnick, director of new business development for Lucent, says PIPSP will eliminate the incompatibility problems that have so far prevented Internet telephone service providers from offering seamless service to their customers. "The product is targeted toward IP CLECs, next-generation telcos and Internet telephony service providers." She adds that Lucent will also market the software to traditional carriers to help them migrate into the IP arena. With PIPSP, Lucent is looking to help service providers solve a pair of problems. The product's interoperability module aims to cure the headaches caused by signaling, directory and protocol incompatibilities between packet-circuit gateways from different vendors. The product's software switch component is designed to support connectivity between public telephone networks and various Internet telephony networks. The software switch also allows users to offer their customers intelligent network services such as call waiting, call forwarding, billing and operator assistance. Trebnick notes that telephony service providers would like to be able to interwork all of the endpoints that customers might want to use. A service provider, for example, might like to be able to terminate onto a PC running Microsoft NetMeeting a call that originated from a plain old telephone. But interworking various telephony endpoints is not currently feasible because many endpoints speak incompatible protocols. "Even endpoints that claim to speak the same protocol often speak different dialects of that protocol," observes Trebnick. NetMeeting, for example, speaks a different dialect of the H.323 standard than widely-used SIP applications. Further complicating matters is the fact that incompatibility can also lurk inside the service provider's network. Suppose that a service provider wants to transport calls over the Internet. Transporting PSTN calls over the Internet requires a circuit-packet gateway. On the circuit side, all such gateways speak some subset of PSTN protocols. On the packet side, however, gateways tend to speak incompatible protocols. The Cisco 5300 gateway, for example, speaks the Cisco 5300 dialect of H.323, while the Lucent ITS-SP Gateway speaks LWP, a proprietary protocol. Since these gateways don't interoperate, a service provider that has only Cisco 5300 gateways in the U.S. and ITS-SP gateways in Europe cannot route transatlantic calls over the Internet. "This is the sort of situation that PIPSP is designed to remedy," says Trebnick. Trebnick identifies Cisco Systems and Concentric Networks as Lucent's primary competitors in the Internet telephony services market. Earlier this month, Cisco teamed with Hitachi America in an alliance to jointly develop and market Internet telephony reference platforms and related technologies. Concentric offers an array of Internet telephony services. A beta trial of PIPSP is currently underway. General availability is slated for the first quarter of 1999. The interoperability module will be priced at $180 per gateway port. Pricing for the software switched component has not yet been announced. ____________________ By John Edwards. Mr. Edwards is a freelance technology writer based in Mount Laurel, N.J.