General DataComm (www.gdc.com) in the first quarter of 2001 plans to unveil the NexEra 7000 product line. The new group of packet telephony media gateways can offload dialed Internet traffic from CLASS 4 and 5 switches, and can handle dynamic trunking at the originating central office, eliminating the need for tandem switching.
Lubo Malynowsky, vice president of marketing for GDC's broadband division, says the dynamic trunking feature could enable a carrier to slash its capital budget because it wouldn't have to invest in any new switch ports.
The new products likely will premiere at SUPERCOMM next year and are expected to be available mid-2001.
The new product line is an extension of GDC's existing NexEra 6000 media gateway for smaller networks, which has been available for three months. One system can process 2,500 voice ports.
The 7000 has 40,000 channels on a single rack and does two shelves on a rack for 20,000 DS0 channels.
Both the 6000 and 7000 lines convert TDM traffic to ATM adaptation layer 2 (AAL2) and also support SS7 on the gateway itself.
"We give carriers a means of packetizing their voice networks by transporting all calls over ATM," Malynowsky says.
Unlike some solutions that call for one TDM call to map onto an ATM switched virtual circuit (SVC) - thus requiring a forklift in a carrier's existing ATM switch capabilities - the GDC takes 248 calls and puts them on a single SVC.
Malynowsky says GDC's expertise in AAL2 is a major point of differentiation for the vendor. Another key differentiate, according to Malynowsky, is GDC's cost per port, which he says will be $70 less than the competition. He says competitors' products typically sell for around $150 per port.
To cut carrier costs, GDC's gateways include built-in digital cross connects. They'll also be able to do full DSLAM aggregation --- so the boxes can accept traffic directly from DSLAMs as well as voice switches --- and send it all to an ATM backbone.
