Posted: 07/15/1999
Beyond Basic Bits
SUPERCOMM Signals Services for IP Telephony
By Paula Bernier
Interoperability, enhanced services and voice over digital subscriber line (VoDSL) were the hot topics surrounding Internet protocol (IP) telephony at SUPERCOMM '99 last month in Atlanta.
Of course, as with all new technologies, interoperability among different vendor's products is always an issue. And IP telephony is no exception.
Although the 3.5-year-old industry quickly adopted the H.323 standard borrowed from the videoconferencing world, different implementations of the standard exist. And H.323 only addresses certain aspects of interoperability and communications. Now vendors are getting together on a one-to-one basis for interoperability.
Meanwhile, a broad slate of equipment providers in the past few months have lined up behind an implementation of H.323 version 2 called iNow. And the list continues to grow. Excel Switching Corp., Hyannis, Mass., and Nokia Inc., Helsinki, Finland, for example, have thrown their support behind the iNow initiative.
"iNow and TIPHON (telephone and Internet protocol harmonization over networks) we're looking to support; both go beyond H.323 itself," says Dan MacDonald, vice president of wireless business communications, who works in the Ottawa Nokia office. TIPHON is a standard out of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).
"iNow ensures H.323 version 2 [interoperability]," he adds. "It makes things work together. We'll be iNow compliant with gatekeepers and gateways in the first quarter of 2000."
While many vendors have put the H.323 label on their products, many equipment providers believe that H.323 is lacking in certain areas and that other proposed standards are more suitable for large, public networks. So call-control architectures such as session initiation protocol (SIP), SIP Plus and multimedia gateway control protocol (MGCP) over the past year or so appeared on the scene in an attempt to replace H.323--or at least fill in the blanks.
A Sea Change
VocalTec Communications Ltd., the U.S. operations of which are based in Fort Lee, N.J.; NetSpeak Corp., Boca Raton, Fla.; and RADVision Inc. USA, Mahwah, N.J., are the three companies with which Cisco Systems Inc., San Jose, Calif., recently announced H.323 interoperability.
But interoperability is about more than just allowing different vendors' similar products to work together, such as gateways talking to gateways, notes Alistair Woodman, group manager, packet-telephony applications for Cisco.
"There's a sea change in the marketplace away from the vertically integrated companies that do it all from gateways and gatekeepers to the services to infrastructure and then services that will control that infrastructure," he says.
In line with that trend, Cisco at SUPERCOMM announced plans to interface with various other companies' products and services. Cisco says it plans to support the open settlements protocol (OSP) on its gateways to work with clearinghouse/settlements provider services from GRIC Communications Inc., Milpitas, Calif., and TransNexus LLC, Atlanta, which are implementing OSP on their backend servers.
"It's just working on interoperability and tests," Woodman explains. "No OEM (original equipment manufacturing). We're giving them special access into our facilities."
Meanwhile, Cisco is building remote access dial-in user service (RADIUS) extensions on its gateways to allow them to do prepaid calling with billing software from GRIC; MIND CTI Ltd., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Portal Software Inc., Cupertino, Calif.; and Solect Technology Group, Ontario.
And eFusion Inc., Beaverton, Ore.; InfoInteractive Inc., Bedford, Nova Scotia; and NetSpeak are using their H.323-based call control to run Cisco's gateways for Internet call-waiting applications. EFusion has a similar relationship with Cisco for click-to-call as well.
Cisco also is working with NetCentric Corp., Bedford, Mass.; Open Port Technology Inc., Chicago; Software.com, Santa Barbara, Calif.; and Telcordia Technologies Inc., Morristown, N.J., to create interfaces to allow unified communications applications to run over its gateways.
The field trials of all these applications were running as of SUPERCOMM. Cisco expected them to be commercially available by this month.
Bridge to the Past
There's also a third key aspect to interoperability in the realm of IP telephony. That's interoperability with the circuit-switched network, a.k.a. the public switched telephone network (PSTN).
Interconnectivity between new IP networks and the PSTN is necessary to allow calls that originate on an IP network to terminate on the PSTN or vice versa. It also can enable enhanced services to flow across both types of networks. IP-PSTN interconnectivity is such an important issue, in fact, that a slew of products and even vendors are focused specifically on it.
"We're focused exclusively on the control and intelligence piece," says CEO Nagi Rao of telecom technologies Inc., Richardson, Texas. "So we are solely a software company."
The company's mission is to help people with legacy networks leverage the investments they've made.
"We're trying to enable enhanced services over IP networks, which is where the margins are," he adds. "We're making the transparent bridge from the past to the future."
At SUPERCOMM, telecom technologies unveiled two new products to bridge that gap.
INtelligentIP is software that separates intelligence from switches or gateways. It integrates signaling system 7 (SS7) with new, IP-based protocols such as SIP and H.323. The product is comprised of three components: a call agent, which manages what services and policies each caller receives; a signaling agent, which handles the SS7-to-IP translation; and a voice over X gateway, which supports H.323 and SIP.
The second product is called INtelligent ACD, an automatic call distribution (ACD) system for operator services and large call center applications. Rao mentions that operator services is the most profitable enhanced telecommunications service today.
The INtelligentACD includes such features as push to talk (that is, a website button that initiates a customer call over the web with a customer service representative [CSR] or operator), operator call back (which allows customers to enter their phone numbers on a website and have an operator call them back at a certain time), remote agents (extending the call center to remote offices or telecommuters) and skills-based routing (forwarding particular calls to particular agents based on their relationships with customers and/or their skills, such as the ability to answer technical questions or speak a foreign language).
The product is great for new carriers or carriers that, to date, have outsourced their operator services, explains telecom technologies Chairwoman Anousheh Ansari, because it lets carriers start very small and expand as needed. INtelligentACD can be configured for an application with as few as 20 operator positions. By comparison, Richardson, Texas-based Nortel Networks' popular ACD product starts at 20,000 lines, according to Rao.
"CLECs in general outsource [operator services] and ILECs (incumbent local exchange carriers) tend to do it in house," Rao says. "But operator services are very strategic to upsell services. Knowing you make far more calls, I could say 'let me put you on my discount plan.'"
CLECs that outsource operator services to ILECs gives those ILECs a lot of information about their customers, Ansari adds.
While INtelligentACD can start small, it's also capable of supporting a setup with up to 1,000 operators. In fact, one of the largest interexchange carriers (IXCs) in the United States expects to deploy the product this month, Rao says.
INtelligentACD and INtelligentIP are priced at $10,000 per position.
In the same vein, Bridgewater Systems Corp., Kanata, Ontario, at SUPERCOMM unveiled its MultiSpan. The policy-management system uses customer profiles, service logic and dynamic network information to handle and route Internet traffic intelligently. For example, it can direct circuit-switched networks to offload Internet traffic to data switches. It also tracks the status of the network, such as how many network access service points are busy. That can enable carriers to route around failures, do load balancing and offer services to other carriers such as single-number access in a particular geography.
Also at the show, Bridgewater announced its WideSpan product is interoperable with Westford, Mass.-based Sonus Networks Inc.'s GSX9000, a packet switch that supports tens of thousands of simultaneous voice calls. (Bridgewater's WideSpan focuses exclusively on IP service creation and control, whereas the new MultiSpan product is an IP-SS7 bridge.) The combined products will enable service providers to provision and control VoIP and other IP-based services from one central, fully integrated, policy-based management platform. With it, carriers and developers can create and control IP services from e-mail, web hosting and e-commerce applications, to advanced voice services such as Internet call waiting, unified messaging or voice-activated dialing.
Sonus was a popular vendor in the IP telephony sphere at SUPERCOMM. The company announced that Tokyo-based Mitsubishi Corp. will distribute its GSX9000 and Sonus Packet Telephony Suite to the Japanese market. And, Tekelec's IEX division, Richardson, Texas, and Sonus are working together on interoperability between and co-marketing and sales of their respective products. IEX, the acquisition of which by SS7 vendor Tekelec was completed in May, sells the DaVinci line of products, which is server software running on Palo Alto, Calif.-based Sun Microsystems Inc. Unix platforms. DaVinci VOX, announced in May and slated for commercial availability in the fourth quarter, is a media gateway controller that allows carriers with asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and IP networks to offer tandem voice services--such as tracking long distance expenses by customer, call blocking and prepaid--using standard protocols such as Q.2931 and MGCP. DaVinci Service Control Point is a network element that provides data services to carriers using advanced intelligent network (AIN) 0.1 and 0.2 interfaces or proprietary interfaces to major switch vendors; it's used to support such services as enhanced 800, card services and enhanced routing.
Killer Apps
In addition to the signaling and server software to support enhanced services, various vendors at SUPERCOMM also marched out specific new applications to IP networks.
For example, NetSpeak expanded on two of its applications. In partnership with Cisco, NetSpeak extended its WebPhone second-line service by adding a feature that allows users to set "find me, follow me" parameters call by call. In typical "find me, follow me" services, the user can forward all calls to a certain number at a particular time of day, for example, explains Jim Kwock, vice president of marketing at NetSpeak. But the new application, renamed Internet Call Waiting with "CLASS," allows users to recognize incoming calls by number, area code or other parameters and direct and create messages for each call based on that information. Kwock notes that this collaboration with Cisco signals NetSpeak's membership in Cisco's New World ECOmmunity, which means NetSpeak's equipment is interoperable with Cisco's equipment and that the two companies will do joint customer calls and marketing.
In other NetSpeak SUPERCOMM news, the company has made available version 1.1 of its Call Agent software, which was designed to run on cable modems and IP network edge devices. It uses simple gateway control protocol (SGCP)/MGCP to offer such customer calling features as call waiting, call forwarding and return call. According to Kwock, this new release moves toward eliminating the need to use the ILEC for signaling.
Also at the show, NetSpeak released the news that VirtualCom plans to use its entire portfolio of IP telephony equipment and applications to offer competitive long distance services in the United States and Latin America. Initial deployment for VirtualCom's new long distance service will be in Venezuela, Colombia, New York, Miami and Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. The value of the deal was not disclosed.
Gateways to the Future
While the IP telephony emphasis at SUPERCOMM was clearly on interoperability and enhanced services, a variety of vendors also came out with new IP telephony gateways and extensions to their existing gateways or products with gateway functionality.
IP telephony was the name of the game for Nortel at SUPERCOMM, which announced a slew of new products and contracts in this area.
Nuera Communications Inc., San Diego, meanwhile, demonstrated its Open Reliable Communications Architecture (ORCA) GX-21 IP telephony gateway and SSC-3 Unix-based command and control system. The new "carrier class" gateway, to be available this month, can support 100 to 2,000 channels per chassis and per domain up to 50,000 live simultaneous calls per domain. The gateway has frame relay, 10Base-T and 100Base-T interfaces (gigabit Ethernet DS-3 and OC-3 interfaces are scheduled to come available later this year). For high-reliability, hardware components of the product are hot-swappable, NEBS 3-compliant; power and fans are redundant; and the digital signal processors (DSPs) offer a high quality of voice compression, says Andy Voss, Nuera's vice president of marketing. The product now supports MGCP, SIP Plus and H.323. And Nuera is working on developing call-processing software to SS7, ISDN and R2.
Cisco announced extensions to a handful of its products. The 5300 Series Routers doubled in capacity. Voice was added to the 5800 Series Routers. And AccessPath was doubled in capacity.
"We started out modestly in the scale area, now we're moving up in that area," says Cisco's Woodman. "[It's] not just the biggest, but the appropriate type of interfaces. There's another round of stuff that we'll do toward the middle of next year" on both ends of the scale.
Excel Switching also talked about carrier-class design in showing its sub-$300-per-port media gateway and signaling gateway, which offers up 960 ports in one chassis. It's expected to be generally available early next quarter at the latest.
And 3Com Corp., Santa Clara, Calif., added standards-based store-and-forward fax to its Total Access. Real-time fax is slated to be added by the end of the year.
DSL
Of course, VoDSL was also a huge story at SUPERCOMM, as a spate of DSL vendors offered multiline voice solutions and partnered with folks on the IP switching side.
Westell Technologies Inc., Aurora, Ill., announced a VoDSL product called the Communications Portal.
"It uses one DSL pipe to enable customers and services providers to generate some profitable services," says Bruce Albelda, director of investor relations.
Most businesses, like small real estate offices, have eight to 10 voice lines and a fax line, so that's 10 to 11 copper loops. The Communications Portal, a customer-premises based integrated access device (IAD) with DSL transceiver, does all those services and DSL over one loop. It supports up to 20 voice lines, plain old telephone service (POTS) for lifeline, better than 32-kilobit adaptive differential pulse code modulation (ADPCM) quality, and supports popular services like call waiting, hunt groups, music on hold and more.
"It's very good for the CLECs because they only have to buy one loop," he says. And CLECs can lead with either voice or data, "so it's very, very powerful."
But Westell is just one of the emerging VoDSL players. Others include CopperCom Inc., Santa Clara, Calif.; Integrated Network Corp., Bridgewater, N.J.; IPAXS Corp., Tampa, Fla.; Jetstream Communications Inc., Los Gatos, Calif.; PairGain Technologies Inc., Tustin, Calif.; Paradyne, Largo, Fla.; and TollBridge Technologies Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif. (For more on VoDSL, see "Voice Takes DSL Center Stage at SUPERCOMM,").
Nortel Unleashes Hailstorm of IP Voice News
By Paula Bernier
Nortel Networks had a flurry of Internet protocol (IP) telephony news at the SUPERCOMM '99 show in Atlanta last month.
On the enterprise side, the company unveiled 11 new products and various enhancements to existing products. Nortel is calling its new enterprise product line Inca, for Internet Communications Architecture, which it says is based on "open standards." The company's Accelar routing switch is key to the architecture, it says.
New Inca products to be available within the new year include the following.
The Inca M10 Communications System will be built on a policy-based network infrastructure and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT. The M10 connection manager will support analog telephone sets, the company's new i2004 Internet telephones and H.323 client software that allows PCs to make Internet telephony calls. (Also at SUPERCOMM, Nortel announced an actual physical IP phone called the i3220 Internet Tel@phone).
The company's Passport telephony gateways will provide IP-to-public switched telephone network (PSTN) interconnectivity.
The Inca M1, M100 and M7500 Communications Systems will handle telephony intelligence, complex connection management and standard protocol support.
Single and multiuser remote offices can access their corporate office's PBX features over IP-based wide area networks (WANs) using the iRemote product. The IPVoiceFlex feature of the iRemote will toggle between the IP and PSTN networks if there's network degradation on the IP link (and automatically reestablish the IP link if conditions improve).
The Inca Telecommuter is Windows-based PC software designed to access IP-based voice and data services over a standard analog line.
Nortel also will deliver new IP-based phone systems and tools to migrate its existing Meridian systems to work with IP networks. Also this year, Nortel plans to deliver an NT-based product called Enterprise Edge that enables enterprises to choose between packet- and circuit-switching (to allow, for example, having all internal calls run over packet while external calls go over the circuit network).
Other updated products include the Passport 4400 Multi-Service Access Switch, which, with the version 4 release, now supports telephony gateways for branch and regional office applications. The BayRS v13.20, meanwhile, is multiprotocol routing software based on differentiated services (DiffServ), a quality of service (QoS) mechanism being worked on by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
The company also unveiled a handful of unified network applications, including Symposium Call Center Server 3.0, an NT-based product that does skills-based routing and works with the Meridian SL-100 and the DMS-100; the Symposium Web Response Server 2.0, an NT-based system that prioritizes and forwarded e-mail requests to call centers; and the Symposium Agent 2.0, browser-based software that integrates customer and service data on a single interface.
On the public network side, Nortel last month introduced its Versalar Switch Router 25000 and Carrier Networking Services software suite, which were designed to support such services as IP-based virtual private networks (VPNs) and IP telephony. The 25000, for access or core applications, offers throughput of 240 gigabits per second (gbps). It's currently in beta tests. Carrier Networking Services is software that runs over the Versalar switch routers and Passport asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) multiservice switches to manage traffic using multiprotocol label switching (MPLS).
The company also announced last month that MCI WorldCom Inc. will test its Succession and IPConnect products, both of which were unveiled in February, beginning this year. Succession helps carriers with existing circuit-switched networks move traffic onto ATM-based networks (and prepare them to eventually move to IP when QoS mechanisms are in place). IPConnect is a family of integrated service products for new carrier applications.
