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Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tim Luke who wrote (57346)	11/19/1998 4:49:00 PM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 61433

Article in Internet Week re Ascend SS7 Gateway internetwk.com Thursday, November 19, 1998, 4:30 p.m. ET. Ascend To Ship SS7 Gateway By CHUCK MOOZAKIS and SALVATORE SALAMONE Ascend Communications Inc. is betting that if its technology talks the talk without missing a beat, carriers will be able to walk the convergence walk without losing a step. Its Ascend SS7 Gateway (ASG), to be unveiled next Monday, wraps fault tolerance and Signaling System 7 (SS7) support--the telco standard that defines how calls are routed through the PSTN--into a single package. By bundling these capabilities into one platform, Ascend maintains carriers will have the scalability and reliability they need to handle skyrocketing amounts of IP voice and data traffic in a converged world, according to Rod Randall, vice president of marketing for Ascend's carrier signaling and management division traffic. ASG is based on call diversion and SS7 technology originally developed by Stratus Computer Inc., which Ascend purchased earlier this year. In a nutshell, ASG enables remote access equipment--in this case Ascend's Max TNT concentrators--to communicate directly with carriers' SS7 networks, thus redirecting Internet traffic away from the PSTN's regional switches and inter-machine trunks and on to data networks. The second iteration of ASG, expected to be released in January, will integrate signal control point (SCP) technology within SS7 and use both protocols to support more streamlined navigation of calls placed over the Internet. The final phase will take ASG and SS7 and mesh them with the third component of Ascend's previously announced multivoice platform strategy, supporting voice over IP, frame relay and ATM. Those products also will be released next year. Analysts gave Ascend's ASG a strong thumb's up. "They are taking a very pragmatic approach," said Lisa Allocca, senior analyst with Renaissance Worldwide. "Ascend is one of the few folks out there that understands what carrier-class means and the reliability that's needed. It's more than just signaling; it's scalability." Said PITA Group analyst Craig Johnson, "Everybody else is jockeying for position but Ascend is shopping. With the integration of SS7 and SCP, Ascend has what the Nortels and the Lucents want to get into." The ASG "has given us a lot of capabilities," said Bob Walsh, chief information officer for CLEC Thrifty Call Inc. "We have the same issues everyone else has; we want to distribute our loads more evenly. The voice network is designed for voice and Internet traffic is screwing up our engineering. This will give us the ability to take [Internet] calls and deploy them elsewhere." ASG comes in two models: the 50,000-port model is priced at $1.2 million; the 100,000-port model is priced at $1.8 million. In other SS7 news, Bellcore and Level 3 Communications Inc. yesterday agreed to combine their independently developed control protocols into a single unified specification. Specifically, the Internet Protocol Device Control (IPDC) specification, which was developed by Level 3 and a technical advisory council that includes most of the major telecom switch and SS7 gateway vendors, and the Simple Gateway Control Protocol (SGCP), developed by Bellcore and Cisco, will be combined into a single standard called the Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP). MGCP will let service providers control and manage networking equipment at the edges of their networks, helping providers leverage the intelligence of the public switched telephone network for handling data traffic. The type of equipment that will eventually incorporate MGCP includes voice over IP gateways, remote access concentrators, modem banks, and cable modems. The consolidation of the two competing protocols into one should help speed the adoption of call handling technology into equipment and provider networks. "Companies were faced with picking one protocol or implementing both," said Christian Huitema, chief scientist at Bellcore's Internet architecture laboratory. Now they only have to support one. Bellcore and Level 3 have also submitted MGCP to the Internet Engineering Task Force and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.