Jetstream Communications Inc. (www.jetstream.com) today detailed its plans to support service providers in their rollouts of voice over broadband connections and announced enhancements to its existing product line.
After getting off to a slow start, voice over DSL - now "in its infancy" - is now ready to move forward, says Steve Gleave, the Jetstream's vice president of marketing. To give carriers a push to move from trials to commercial deployment of voice over broadband services, Jetstream has announced its three-phase "Formation" strategy. In the first phase, which started in October, Jetstream intends to meet the specific needs of carriers in the early adoption phase of service rollout, with an emphasis on reliability and simplification of the deployment process. During phase two, which begins in the spring of 2001, the vendor expects to help service providers scale their networks to manage thousands of subscribers simultaneously and expand services into new territories. And in the fall of 2001 phase three begins, when Jetstream will help carriers as they seek to add new value to service offerings through enhanced features.
"Every vendor claims to be pioneering in this space. We're trying to have a reality shot," says Gleave. "Voice over DSL hasn't taken hold as quickly as expected, the reason is because point features and upgrades [are the only things available], but [VoDSL] requires systems, equipment and support on operations integration."
In addition to announcing its phased strategy, the company has unveiled new enhancements to various products.
Release 2.1 of the company's CPX-1000 broadband voice services platform, announced today, enables service providers to remove, replace or add system modules without impacting system operation. A hot software upgrade supported by the new release works in a similar fashion. And the CPX-1000 now supports 32 and 16 kilobit ADPCM compression, so carriers to offer voice over broadband services over lower-speed DSL connections and offer the same number of voice lines.
Adding to its lines of integrated access devices, Jetstream now offers a four-port device called the IAD 402 for the low end of the market - such as residential customers that need four voice lines.
Version 2.1 of the company's JetVision management software, meanwhile, enables remote provisioning of the CPX-1000 and Jetstream's IADs and has now has common object request broker architecture, better known as CORBA, applications programming interfaces (APIs) as well as SNMP (simple network management protocol) and TL1 (transaction language 1) interfaces.
"Management is always the Achilles' heal of equipment," says Gleave. "Jetstream believes in delivering network management systems when we deliver the equipment."
In addition, Jetstream today launched JetCare support services. That includes installation and configuration services, remote diagnostics and software load services, tools for customer service, training and documentation, and other help with network planning and support such as how a carrier can set procedures for identifying and turning up subscribers en masse, says Gleave.
