12/7/98 Electronic Engineering Times 4
1998 WL 21641476
Electronic Engineering Times
Copyright 1998 CMP Publications Inc.
Monday, December 7, 1998
1038
News
Net-telephony design deals become the talk of the Western Show
--
Cable carriers embrace voice-over-Internet
Loring Wirbel
Anaheim, Calif. - Cable-TV operators' aggressive plans to deploy
voice-over-Internet Protocol shifted into overdrive at last week's
Western Show, here. Integrated components, development alliances and
carriers' road maps for rolling out the technology were all detailed at
the show, sponsored by the California Cable Television Association.
VoIP has claimed a strategic place in cable operators' arsenal as
they battle traditional phone companies for control of the nascent
IP-telephony business. Cable-modem and headend manufacturers came to
last week's show with VoIP hardware ready for deployment. And 8x8 Inc.,
a specialist in multimedia processing, unveiled a single-chip,
multichannel VoIP processor, called Audacity, that can support both the
H.323 conferencing standard and the emerging Media Gateway Control
Protocol.
Cable multisystem operators (MSOs) hope to leverage the widespread
discontent among end users who are exasperated with phone companies'
struggles thus far to deploy digital-subscriber-line (DSL) services. By
adding IP telephony to the cable-modem mix, the MSOs can ratchet the
competition up a notch and perhaps play the consumer-loyalty game for
keeps, wresting even simple voice services from the circuit-switched
network.
Leo Hindery, president of mammoth MSO Tele-Communications Inc.,
predicted in a panel session here that in a few short years, IP telephony will be accepted by 30 percent of homes passed by a cable
network and high-speed Internet access by 20 percent.
Buck Gee, vice president of marketing for cable-modem manufacturer
Com21 Inc., said he believes Internet-access take rates will beat out IP
telephony for several quarters. But that has not stopped Com21 from
developing a VoIP add-on module for its modem, with help from E-Net Inc.
Indeed, collaboration was the hallmark of many of the VoIP
development deals signed or announced here. Cisco Systems Inc. and ADC
Telecommunications Inc. arrived at a formal agreement to collaborate on
VoIP. In a more informal vein, Vienna Systems Inc. teamed on VoIP
demonstrations with 3Com Corp., and cable-modem maker Terayon
Communication Systems Inc. shared space with Lucent Technologies Inc.
To round off the deal-making, 8x8 agreed to set up a broadband-access
lab in conjunction with 3Com. And 8x8 and Broadcom Corp. (Irvine,
Calif.) demonstrated a VoIP reference design that pairs 8x8's Audacity
chip with Broadcom's 93300 cable-modem physical-layer device, part of
the Broadcom QAMlink architecture.
Tim Lindenfelser, vice president of marketing at Broadcom, said that
the next step in linking VoIP with cable modems will be to add a MIPS
embedded core to the modem transceiver. The company plans to do that
with the 93350 chip. The MIPS instruction set will have extensions for
DSP instructions and is likely to use elements of the voice codec DSP
design licensed from 8x8.
Ultimately, Lindenfelser said, a single-chip solution will integrate
A/D and D/A converters as well as media processors. But such a product
is still several generations away.
Breakout year
Lindenfelser targets 1999 as the breakout year for MSO networks.
First, he said, system manufacturers have been waiting for modem chips
that implement the Data Over Cable Systems Interface Spec (Docsis) 1.1,
which includes the packet fragmentation and prioritization necessary
for supporting near-toll-quality voice. But beyond that, he said, the
economics have changed.
MSOs started talking about IP telephony several years ago but had not yet upgraded their infrastructure to support it. Now, Lindenfelser said,
the addition of hybrid fiber/coax cabling for cable modems is "allowing
the MSOs to incrementally add IP telephony more cheaply than many of the
phone companies or telephony-based Internet-service providers can. This
is a profound shift in the economics of voice services, and I don't
think most of the phone companies even realize it yet."
In an effort to ride that trend with integrated silicon, 8x8 reduced
multichannel codec functions for voice to a single chip aimed at cable
modems or multifunction set-top boxes. The Audacity offering, with an
embedded MIPS RISC processor and single-instruction/multiple-data DSP
core, can support up to four phone lines multiplexed from a cable modem.
Paul Voois, chief executive of 8x8 (Santa Clara, Calif.), said the
company will also offer a $10,000 full packet gateway for those MSOs
that require more ready-made call-control solutions. The inclusion of
both H.323 and the Media Gateway Control Protocol in the chip allows the
designer broad flexibility in implementing VoIP gateways, he said.
For its part, Vienna Systems (Kanata, Ontario), an affiliate of
Newbridge Networks, is taking a less-integrated approach to
first-generation VoIP, offering the standalone IP Shuttle cable-modem
interface for voice multiplexing.
Common topology
Marketing vice president Dan MacDonald at Vienna said that there will
be plenty of opportunity to shrink the IP Shuttle to an add-in module
for existing cable modems. Vienna's VoIP-system design efforts with
3Com, he said, could have a direct effect on the carrier architecture
jointly proposed by 3Com, Newbridge and Siemens AG, which are
consolidating broadband-switch architectures in a common topology.
MacDonald said Vienna is working with Newbridge on 36100 MainStreet,
a special carrier-gateway version of the MainStreet broadband switch.
But he added that standalone gateways will be commoditized through the
Media Gateway Control Protocol standards effort.
Thus, a full VoIP strategy for MSOs or traditional phone carriers
must incorporate call-control gatekeepers, traditional gateways,
applications, access devices and billing systems, MacDonald said.
The drive to embed voice processing into cable modems is one of
several converging trends that seek to lower the costs and ease the
installation of cable modems. In evidence of those other trends at the
show, Terayon rolled a self-configuring cable-modem kit for end users
who desire a self-installed service. Several vendors launched
second-generation modems with packet-prioritization features. And
Motorola Inc. signed a pact with Tut Systems Inc. to embed support for
Tut's HomeRun phone-line-conditioning technology into cable modems aimed
at home networking.
For its part, Dell Computer announced at the show it will ship 3Com
cable-modem modules in some of its PCs. Market researcher Dataquest Inc.
(San Jose, Calif.) projects cable-modem shipments this year will reach
492,000 units, up from 214,000 units in 1997.
December 07, 1998 |
