Good Things Come in Small Packages

As VoIP grows, service providers are finding it to their advantage to be able to link to the PSTN at an increasing number of locations. So vendors that long have served the gateway segment are introducing devices that are smaller, more economical and have a large number of features despite their little footprints.

Service providers are using these products because they bring not only more flexibility in small products — sometimes scaling as low as three or four T1s — but also because they have beefed up performance, supporting both media and signaling functions, and a wide range of protocols and standards in both areas.

The first product announced by Excel Switching Corp. after its acquisition of Brooktrout Technology was an enhanced version of its IMG 1010 combined signaling and media gateway. The product does both media processing and call control in a unit that is just IRU-high.

The chief selling point of the 1010 is its any-to-any functionality converting between IP and TDM signaling, especially providing SS7 support for cost-effective connection to PSTN carriers. “We feel that combining signaling and trunking gateway functions in one product saves capex and opex, even reducing colocation costs,” says Peter Vescuso, vice president of market development at Excel Switching. “One competitor uses six rack units” to do similar functions.

The new version — Excel already has shipped 30,000 ports of the original release — adds support for SIP and additional density to the platform, so it transcodes among SIP, H.323, SS7 and ISDN in the gateway itself, without softswitch support. “With the ability to run those protocols, it supports the idea of any-to-any networking,” says Vescuso.

The product also is intended to perform a wide range of media transcoding, and now supports all of the G. Series of digital voice codecs. In the near future, Excel will add support for mobile codecs.

An important market for the product will be competitive carriers looking to add their own facilities. “With regulatory pressures, CLECs are going to owned infrastructure. So there is increased spending for products like this,” says Vescuso. The product also is aimed at “TDM carriers that want to develop an IP strategy or an IP carrier looking to add capacity.”

The IMG 1010 has been deployed by Ntera Holdings Inc., a provider of wholesale long-distance with PoPs throughout North America and plans to expand into Mexico. According to Vescuso, the company is using the 1010 to replace OC12 connections between PoPs with an IP core. Also, Ntera used the IMG 1010’s SS7 capabilities to replace gateway interface cards to a Nortel Networks Class 4 switch that cost $800 apiece.

Ntera retains its Nortel Class 4 DMS 100 and Lucent Technologies Inc. (formerly Telica) LCS media gateway controller in major centers and now uses the IMG 1010 gateways in smaller markets.

“We are using the product for a variety of purposes,” says Mike Vazquez, director of operations at Ntera. “We are using it to signal to the existing SIP gateways of other networks as well as an edge device for our existing network. So it is interoperating with other SIP gateways as well as taking our own network calls on the edge.”

Internally, “We use the product mostly with SS7, but on the edge we do interoperate with ISDN as well,” Vazquez adds.

The advantage for Ntera of the IMG 1010 is “the size of the united functions and also we have a long history with Excel Switching and their product lines,” says Vazquez. “The most notable aspect of this product is that, for its size, it fully supports SS7 and C7. No other VoIP gateway that I am familiar with is doing that successfully.”

Other small gateways that offer multiple functionalities include the new compact Veraz Networks Inc. I-Gate 4000 EDGE. Designed to scale between 100 and 500 concurrent calls, the product gives distributed media and centralized call control and signaling resources in a few strategic locations. It supports compressed backhaul and local switching applications with the ability to transport compressed voice, fax, SS7 and ISDN-PRI signaling information over IP networks. The product’s compressed TDM bearer capabilities over existing leased TDM links give a service provider a capacity increase up to 1,000 percent. The product also has been tested for compatibility with numerous softswitches.

Another entry in this area is the Quintum Technologies Inc. Tenor VoIP MultiPath Switch family, which the company continues to refine and augment with new functionality. The newest versions of the gateways and switches support routing of calls using DNS addressing rather than just IP addresses. IP addresses can change, but URLs often are more stable, reducing configuration time. Further, Tenor also now supports an IP Discovery Protocol, which eliminates the need to configure the IP address by the console. Other features include more support for VoIP local access, plus the ability to specify which SIP proxies are granted access for greater security.