Virtually ever since the emergence of VoIP, pundits have talked about how long-distance arbitrage--the initial justification for packetizing voice--would fall away. A new breed of service would be the long-term driver of the convergence of voice and data, they said.
Despite the talk about services and applications on these next-generation networks, plain vanilla voice is still the flavor of the day. And carriers that provide enhanced services typically are serving up a subset of what's already available on the PSTN.
What gives?
Many industry players say that carriers simply needed time to build out the networks on which all these new services eventually will sit. The solidification of the SIP standard and the introduction of new service creation and hosting platforms will help create an environment that's ripe for the introduction of new and innovative services, according to IP voice vendors.
"The killer app now is kind of mundane," admits Joe Mele, vice president and general manager of Open Network Solutions at Lucent Technologies Inc. (www.lucent.com). Now that IP networks are built out, he says, "I don't think the floodgates will open, but I think you will see [new enhanced services introduced] incrementally."
According to Terri Griffin, vice president of INIP marketing at Sonus Networks Inc. (www.sonusnetworks.com), 2000 was the year of the softswitch, and 2001 is the year of the application server. She says that in 2000, media gateway control protocol (MGCP) was finalized, SIP made progress and the core infrastructure became more solidified.
"It's going as fast as it possibly can, I think," Griffin says, referring to the development and implementation of next-gen enhanced services.
Joan Spindel, vice president of marketing with dynamicsoft Inc. (www.dynamicsoft. com), says that at this point, the next-generation networks really are mimicking the PSTN on the enhanced services front. But the money is in presence-based services, "click to talk" and an extension of "click to talk" through which one party can guide the other through an Internet site, she says.
In his speech at the Voice on the Net (VON, www.von.org) conference in March, dynamicsoft CEO Eric Sumner said that "many companies here are in fact struggling for survival." Companies need to decide what layer of the network they want to focus on and "crush that layer."
But while so many of the companies in the audience were focused on the transport layer, Sumner opines that "where the money comes in the end is the top layer." That means enhanced services.
Sumner said that only one of seven calls makes it to the intended party, while most get a busy signal or go to voicemail. He says, "If you know where the party is, you can build a service that is much more polite" to callers.
He added that, in the future, regular calling to an end point at a set location will be seen as "stone age."
Spindel notes that dynamicsoft started life to drive SIP adoption, which many vendors in the packetized voice space believe will be a significant force in driving next-generation applications.
A Cool SIP
"The cool stuff really happens with SIP," says Peter Schorsch, director of marketing with Telcordia Technologies Inc. (www.telcordia.com). The protocol lets softswitches tap into application servers, he explains. "SIP is really what connects the dots."
In the spring, Telcordia will have its first execution of SIP application programming interfaces (APIs) on its Class 5 Call Agent softswitch product.
Meanwhile, dynamicsoft offers its user agents a SIP stack that includes APIs, call simulators and more, as well as access to an interoperability testing tool through membership in its NetValue program, which also includes marketing support, says Spindel.
At the same time, dynamicsoft and Sonus are collaborating to drive new applications to VoIP networks. The companies already have demonstrated interoperability between the dynamicsoft SIP Proxy Server and the Sonus INtelligentIP Softswitch. The dynamicsoft SIP Proxy Server performs routing and other key functions in SIP-based networks.
In addition, Sonus has integrated dynamicsoft solutions into its PSX6000 SoftSwitch to support SIP-based traffic.
Schorsch envisions SIP driving things like click to dial, potentially even tapping into devices like the Palm for such applications. "You've got this stuff in your Palm Pilot, but it's not always most useful there," he says.
Subscribers also could carry their personal contacts and preferences in other forms to enable them to plug them into these next-generation networks, says Schorsch. At the VON show, Schorsch had what he called a Java button, a futuristic piece of metal slightly larger than a watch battery, on which he says personal profiles could be stored in the future.
The button could be plugged into a special reader tied to any customer premises communications device to register the user's preferences with the device and/or the network.
But it should come as no surprise that today's telephones will continue be the most widespread clients of these new next-generation networks in the foreseeable future.
"The black phones are the really important ones because they're the ones deployed in significant numbers," notes Sumner. After that, he says, softphone PC clients, will emerge in significant numbers due to PC vendors, such as Compaq Computer Corp. (www.compaq.com) and Dell Computer Corp. (www.dell.com), working with companies like Intel Corp. (www.intel.com) and Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) to deliver read-to-use softphone features as users turn up their computers (a softphone is a computer with software that enables it to act as a telephone, often with added features such as "click-to-call" phone books).
Of course, the market already has seen its share of softphones. Softswitch company Unisphere Networks Inc. (www.unispherenetworks.com), through its BroadSoft Inc. (www.broadsoft.com) acquisition, is offering PC software to manage and forward calls.
Voyant Technologies Inc. (www.voyanttech.com) was showing an instant IP conferencing phone at VON that allows users to hit a button to set instantly a conference with others. The feature is supported on a hard phone or via software working with Microsoft's Outlook program. The application, for which Voyant provides application server software, was designed to run via IP networks, which, unlike the PSTN, can provision bandwidth on the fly and give end users more control, says CEO Dick Schulte.
According to Sumner, 3G cellular phones, which he says will all be SIP-based endpoints with built-in presence features as a result of mobility, will follow the emergence of softphones.
"Mobile carriers are becoming clearer on mobile media messaging because they already see user locations," says Henrik Rudberg, business development manager of Hotsip AB (www. hotsip.com), a provider of SIP-based software that can run on clients or Sun Solaris application servers. The 3G Partnership Project and 3G2, a U.S. group, have adopted SIP for call control and multimedia messaging, he says.
Application Platforms
But the real focus right now seems to be less on the endpoints and more on the network-based devices over which many of those applications are expected to run. Indeed, many vendors announced recently plans for application servers/creation environments that sit off the softswitch (or, in some cases, off the traditional Class 5 switch) to support enhanced services.
A new converged service creation environment from dynamicsoft combines messaging, conferencing and presence using web-based standardized protocols to allow it to link to other devices such as media servers and gateways.
Meanwhile, LongBoard Inc. (www.longboardinc.com) supplies application infrastructure software called the LongBoard Multi-Media Applications Platform (LMAP) that decouples Class 5 features from the switch and runs them on Sun servers. But beyond basic Class-like features, the company web-enables applications to allow for subscriber provisioning. The LMAP can work with a SIP phone, with an IAD to serve a black phone, with a media gateway controller to serve a media gateway, with a next-generation switch, or via an SS7 link to a standard CO switch.
Kim Niederman, LongBoard's president and CEO, says LMAP offers performance nearing that of a Nortel DMS-100. "We handle 138 calls per second, 500,000 busy hour call attempts and five 9s reliability," he says.
The company's architecture consists of a collection of feature, policy and connectivity engines between which it can do load balancing for maximum availability. The load manager engine sends an "application heartbeat" to other engines to see if load balancing is needed.
"It's the dirty stuff. It's what it takes to really meet the carrier grade environments," says Tim Ward, vice president of marketing at LongBoard. "But it's the applications that sell it."
In addition, LongBoard has what it calls the SIP Portal, which unifies different vendors' applications like unified messaging, conferencing and presence-based services and provides unified interface for all that to the carrier. That includes a single carrier interface for network management, billing, provisioning and advanced services management.
Like many vendors focused on the enhanced services/application software space, LongBoard is running on a general-purpose box. In its case, Sun servers.
But while vendors boast impressive performance on such general-purpose platforms, and while a key theme behind the move to voice over IP is "open platforms", many believe the specific applications will require the added horsepower of a DSP-based box or at least a separate server.
Matt Johnson, senior product manager for global softswitch services at Level 3 Communications Inc. (www.level3.com), expects to see two types of boxes support enhanced services on next-generation networks like Level 3's: a general purpose one and a bank of DSPs that's relatively dumb. The general-purpose device would host all the intelligence, like the softswitch, proxy server, etc. On the DSP bank would be a SIP interface, which would allow it to serve as a conference server, media gateway, modem bank or other device, he says.
Johnson also says the Lucent TNT product line has DSPs and an OS, but he says the OS could be removed and run on a general-purpose platform instead.
Brian Silver, vice president of voice strategy at Unisphere Networks Inc. (www.unispherenetworks. com), says enhanced services can sit anywhere on the network. It's up to the carrier to decide where. Everybody runs softswitches on Sun servers, Silver says. He adds, you can't run all services and processing on one box because it maxes it out, so it needs to be broken out somehow.
Applications servers are general-purpose boxes that applications can run on, he explains. Then there are media servers that handle stuff like voicemail, conferencing, three-way calling and announcement.
To do those functions, you need DSPs," he says. "You can do it with a general-purpose box, but it doesn't scale because it's processing-intensive. Media servers can be general-purpose, as is BroadSoft, but those devices are intended for relatively low-usage conferencing."
VocalData Inc. (www.vocaldata.com), which runs over a Sun Solaris box, does its voicemail application all in software, says Kathleen Meier, vice president of marketing. "But you do get to a point where it breaks down because of scaling."
For the more processing-intensive application of conferencing, VocalData adds a DSP card to allow the network operator to manage more ports in a more efficient way, she says.
Scott St. Clair, vice president of communications at NetSpeak Corp. (www.netspeak.com), says conferencing needs the processing power of DSPs because it's a very involved application. In a multiparty conferencing application, the network would have to decode multiple 729 audio streams into uncompressed digital audio, mix those streams, re-encode them and send them back out to the conferencing parties.
"That's very processing-intensive--you need DSPs to do that," he says. NetSpeak, which is running its initial applications on Windows 2000 boxes, plans to use DSP boxes in the future for messaging and conferencing. One up-and-coming company that specializes in DSP boxes to handle those types of jobs is SnowShore Networks (www.snowshore.com), St. Clair notes.
But Ralph Hayon, CEO and president of congruency Inc. (www.congruency.com), says using DSPs doesn't make sense. Using DSP-based platforms goes against the basic idea of next-generation networks, which were supposed to allow network operators to benefit from the flexibility of quickly adding new services, be able to use relatively low-cost hardware and have the freedom to add applications from any vendor that using general-purpose platforms would allow, he explains.
Hayon says people should be offering new services in software rather than hardware.
But beyond the debates relating to and product availability of all these platforms for enhanced services, at least a couple of key questions remain.
Who will write all these new applications? And who will pay for them?
While the market has seen a handful of new applications for next-generation voice networks, it's nothing like the hailstorm of "yet to be imagined" new and innovative applications that industry players have promised for the past several years.
So who are these independent software vendors everybody says will come and realize the dream?
This spring, Microsoft announced an Internet initiative, called HailStorm, to use network-based databases that include calendars, address books and credit-card information. That sounds promising, but security and privacy issues remain to be addressed.
But aren't there some software companies that could offer something a little more innovative than "click to call" IP voice features?
Michelle Blank, senior vice president of galactic marketing at RADVision Ltd. (www.radvision. com), says carriers and their systems integrators may have to take the bull by the horns to create some services they think customers will vote for with their pocketbooks.
