VoIP Equipment: A Year in Review
Posted December 10, 1998 04:00 PM PST
"Carrier class" gateways, interoperability and "services" were the buzzwords of 1998 in the voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) world. But while they got a lot of lip service, very little of the three actually made an appearance in the marketplace.
Instead, equipment vendors came out with VoIP gateways and gatekeepers with ever larger ports-per-chassis and call-processing capabilities, but those products still lack key features carriers require. A slew of new products carrying the H.323 label hit the streets, but in most cases these products still do not offer interoperability with other vendors' H.323 products. And the enhanced services that came to market were so few and similar from vendor to vendor that they seem to offer very little ability for carrier differentiation, which is arguably the main benefit of offering an enhanced service in the first place.
Carrier-Class Infrastructure
Although the words "carrier class" appeared in stacks of press releases and marketing sheets, and fell from the lips of many a speaker at the Voice on the Net (VON) and VoIP-related sessions at the computer telephony shows this year, there seems to be some confusion as to exactly what makes a product "carrier class."
In referring to their products as "carrier class," vendors typically describe their ports-per-chassis availability and stackable scalability. They say their products have passed National Equipment and Building Standards (NEBS) compliance-testing, which the Bells require equipment to pass before gaining entry to their central switching offices. NEBS is basically a collection of benchmarks related to a piece of equipment's environmental ruggedness--such as the amount pressure or heat a box can withstand before collapsing or melting.
Cisco Systems Inc. (http://www.cisco.com) talks about how its AccessPath VS3, which can scale to more than 1,200 ports, supports any line connection and has a highly reliable new architecture, is carrier-class (Sounding Board, October, page 22). IBM Corp. (www.ibm.com) announced a "carrier-grade" RS/6000-based gateway to go along with the gatekeeper it recently acquired through its DataBeam Corp. acquisition (Sounding Board, October, page 22). Both, the vendors emphasize of their respective products, are NEBS-compliant.
"With carrier class, there's more focus on NEBS and carrier testing. Incumbents use their carrier labs to shake down the technology, so there's more scrutinization," says Bruce Gellman, vice president of marketing and sales with AudioCodes (www.audiocodes.com).
Vendors also are moving from the personal computer (PC)-based systems that are still common today to embedded systems with more efficient operating systems and digital signal processing, says Sarig Zur, vice president of sales and marketing with ArelNet Ltd. (www.arelnet.com). ArelNet's gateway also is PC-based, "but in the future that's going to be changed," he says.
ArelNet, whose iTone IP gateway Nortel Networks (http://www.nortel.com) is distributing in the United States, now offers hundreds of ports per site, but the company has a vision "to provide higher density gateways" in the near future, Zur says.
In similar moves to scale up and add reliability and functionality, several vendors are planning programmable switch-based products (Sounding Board, May/June, page 21). Cisco is buying Summa Four Inc. (www.summafour.com). VocalTec Communications Ltd. (www.vocaltec.com) and others are porting their software on programmable switches from Excel Switching Corp. (www.xl.com). And Ascend Communications Inc. (www.ascend.com) is buying signaling system 7 (SS7) and fault-tolerant computer vendor Stratus Computer Inc. (www.stratus.com).
Meanwhile, all the major central office (CO) switch vendors are talking about offering IP telephony cards that can fit into their large circuit-based switches. But to date no such products are available.
On the IP telephony component front, CompactPCI, a standards-based technology that allows carriers to replace boards on their equipment without having to turn off service--a practice known as "hot swapping"--also is a key to several vendors' strategies to better serve IP telephony service providers.
According to Sun Microsystems Inc. (www.sun.com), which cut a strong profile at its first VON show this fall in Washington, Compact PCI is one of the linchpins of its VoIP strategy.
"We're very bullish on Compact PCI," says Jeff Veis, telco original equipment manufacturer (OEM) products group manager for the microelectronics group at Sun. "We see it as the technology of choice for webtone in carrier grade."
But, Veis adds, CompactPCI will be more than just a technology for Internet telephony service providers' (ITSPs') COs. It will be the hub of home communications to support multiple services.
Sun is co-marketing Compact PCI and PCI products with other components vendors such as Dialogic Corp. (www.dialogic.com), Dynamicsoft (www.dynamicsoft.com) and Natural MicroSystems Corp. (www.nmss.com).
Veis says Sun's Full Moon software initiative will address the software part of the equation to allow carriers to pull out cards and redistribute processing to complete a task. CompactPCI addresses the hardware part.
Sun's aim, Veis says, is to offer the reliability of an Ultra SPARC or Solaris server at any scale or price point.
"We're now shipping $2,500 workstations vs. a $25,000 workstation," he says.
While Sun is pushing its servers and components to host IP telephony services and applications, ever-present Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) is working with a raft of vendor partners, including eFusion Inc. (www.efusion.com), e-Net Inc. (www.datatelephony.com), Nortel, 3Com Corp. (www.3com.com), Siemens AG (www.siemens.de) and VocalTec, which are planning to run gateway and other IP telephony-related software on Microsoft's NT server, says Microsoft's Kevin Cherry, senior marketing manager of enhanced services for the company's Internet customer unit.
Meanwhile, Cisco this year has come out with a wide variety of products that support packetized voice in addition to traditional bursty data, with separate cards for the different functionality. Its latest VoIP product release as of press time was the AccessPath-VS3, which is the largest VoIP product from Cisco to date. But Cisco is offering a range of equipment with various port sizes. Even carriers don't always need dense solutions, but they do want product reliability, says Alistair Woodman, Cisco product line manager of packet voice technologies.
A new architecture called DASA introduced in the AccessPath-VS3 product is a key way Cisco is offering carriers reliability.
"At some point increasing backup has questionable benefit because no one wants to pay for a gold-plated solution," Woodman says. "Instead, vendors need to make sure their products offer self-healing--that's what DASA does."
Despite these key advances in basic IP telephony hardware and software, nobody to date has a full operating CO-like solution--including support for 911, 411, life-line service or hearing impaired users--for packetized voice, says Cisco's Woodman.
"We won't see these this year, probably next year," Woodman says. It's a tall order to fill, he says, and vendors need more time to write and test software to support that kind of functionality.
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© 1998 Virgo Publishing, Inc. Excerpted from VoIP Equipment: A Year in Review, by Paula Bernier, appearing Sounding Board magazine. To read the rest of this article, please click here. For more information about Sounding Board, please click on their logo at the top of this article. |
