Posted 07/2000
Softswitch Startups Find Strength in Numbers
By Charlotte Wolter
As the proverbial Davids facing down the Goliaths of Lucent Technologies Inc. (www.lucent.com) and Nortel Networks Corp. (www.nortelnetworks.com), several of the startup softswitch vendors coming onto the market this year have chosen to form alliances with other vendors to put some muscle behind their pitch.
"Muscle," in the new paradigm of deconstructed voice switches, is interoperability, or the ability to work seamlessly with a wide range of gateways and applications to provide as much choice and flexibility as possible, not to mention the benefits customers will get from the competition.
The player that most recently has thrown its hat in the alliance ring is softswitch vendor ipVerse Inc. (www.ipverse.com), which has announced the Open Softswitch Alliance (OSA). It joins earlier alliances fostered by two other softswitch makers, Sonus Networks Inc.'s (www.sonusnet.com) Open Services Partner Alliance (OSPA) and telecom technologies inc.'s (www.telecomtechnologies.com) INIP (IntelligentIP) Powered Partner Program. Big-time competitor Cisco Systems Inc. (www.cisco.com) has its own interoperability group, the Cisco New World Ecosystem Partner Program.
New-world voice switching consists of three main elements: softswitches, gateways and feature servers. A softswitch controls media gateways of various kinds (time-division multiplexing (TDM), DSL, etc.) and interacts with feature servers (or application servers) to deliver voice applications.
The interfaces between the three elements are in flux. Although standards activity is lively, it is very early in the standards process and few implementations are widely accepted. A variation of media gateway control protocol (MGCP), called MEGACO or H.248, is widely expected to be the standard interface between softswitches and gateways, but a standard will not be delivered until later this year and interoperability testing will take at least another year.
"Just having a protocol like MGCP is a first step" in communication between softswitches and gateways, says Paul Singh, vice president of business development and co-founder of ipVerse. "Beyond that we have to decide which vendors we will partner with to do the things that are not yet in the standard. For example, we need to implement a failover capability. Also, we need to make sure the customer thinks of them as one system and not two for management purposes."
It also is widely accepted that softswitches will communicate across a network using a protocol called session initiation protocol (SIP), but again, interoperability among vendors is just beginning to be tested.
One of the most critical interfaces, the one between applications and softswitches, remains contentious. Because it is essentially an API, a standard interface that application developers can write to, commonality is important. Application developers will not, in the long run, be willing to rewrite an application for every softswitch on the market. The International Softswitch Consortium (www.softswitch.org) is attempting to forge an agreed-upon API, with SIP proposed as an early, though not necessarily final, solution.
One of the newest partners for telecom technologies is DSL gateway vendor Tollbridge Technologies Inc. (www.tollbridgetech.com). "We see synergy because we have many markets in common, the CLECs being a big one," says Tracy Venters, director of product marketing for telecom technologies. "Being able to offer a complete solution from the customer premises through the gateway to a softswitch, and with some of our other partners, adding value-added services, we see a lot of value there."
The products are so new that responsibility for integrating the parts of a system falls to vendors. ipVerse today integrates its softswitch with gateways by Tellabs Inc. (www.tellabs.com), as well as its recent acquisition, SALIX Technologies Inc., (www.salix.com) and Cisco.
