Ryan Koontz, director of marketing at AFC, says there are an estimated 20,000 Class 5 switches in the country used to route America’s phone calls. That number will shrink as the biggest U.S. phone companies install new routing gear capable of supporting such services as Internet-based calling and VoD.
AFC wants to help telecom carriers, including Sprint Corp., make the transformation at the edge of their networks where customer lines connect to access equipment at the phone companies’ central offices. So AFC has introduced AdvancedVoice, a voice solution helping telecom carriers migrate their access networks from a circuit-switched architecture to converged networks capable of delivering both packetized voice and high-speed data services.
AdvancedVoice is in trials and scheduled to be ready for widespread release in the middle of the year, Koontz says.
AdvancedVoice is just one application supported by AFC’s multiservice access platform, AccessMAX. Koontz says nearly 1,000 carriers worldwide have implemented AccessMAX, which also supports DSL and FTTP, and can be configured as a DLC, DSLAM or optical line terminal.
Sprint is testing AdvancedVoice as it plans to replace its Class 5 switches with Nortel Networks Corp. softswitches, capable of routing calls over a managed data network and supporting such new phone features as video. In October 2001, Nortel announced a $1.1 billion contract with Sprint to convert 1 million lines into packet-switched lines.
Matt Jackson, director of VoIP marketing with Nortel, says Sprint also will be able to consolidate 133 central offices into 32 offices because the softswitch can control media gateways from up to 1,000 miles away.
“Sprint will continue converting lines from traditional Class 5 switches to next-generation softswitches, reaching 900,000 lines over the next two years,” says Jim Hansen, senior vice president of Sprint Local Telecommunications Division Network. “AFC’s AdvancedVoice solution is a component to successfully achieving our ... objectives, enabling us to provide voice over packet services using our existing access equipment.”
