Network Solutions Softswitch Vendors Showcase Partnerships, SIP

Industry consolidation moves vendors toward Class 5 capabilities

Charlotte Wolter
05/02/2001

To prepare themselves for SUPERCOMM, vendors of new IP voice equipment took their wares to Voice on the Net (VON, www.pulver.com), IP voice's most targeted convention.

VON is where the voice-over-IP industry takes its collective pulse, exchanges technologies, makes partnerships, establishes standards and sets its agenda for the coming year. SUPERCOMM is where the vendors sell.

"SUPERCOMM is where the carriers are," says an industry executive. "There are some at VON, but they may be just looking for new technology. At SUPERCOMM they will actually buy."

Therefore, many products that have been unveiled during the past year, or were demonstrated at VON or other recent outings, such as ISPCon (www.ispcon.com) and Net World + Interop (www.interop.com), will be shown as generally available or soon-to-be-available products at SUPERCOMM. Therefore, this show is a litmus test of how far IP voice vendors have progressed in fulfilling their promises to have highly reliable large-scale softswitches with full functionality, as well as gateways, application servers and application suites for IP voice available by the middle of 2001.

Also at VON, it became evident that the new protocol for IP voice networks, SIP, has become the driving technological force within the industry. Softswitch vendors that did not already support SIP announced they had added the protocol or have a roadmap to do so.

The pre-eminence of SIP is also the main factor in another emerging trend: the emphasis on IP voice application servers and the applications themselves, because SIP enables peer-to-peer networking for voice. Much like other applications on an IP network, SIP enables intelligent end devices to signal into the network to set up calls with or without a softswitch. These same end devices--SIP phones, soft phones on PCs, SIP integrated access devices (IADs), SIP enabled cell phones--also can call on application servers to set up enhanced applications, such as unified messaging and location-based services.

The peer-to-peer capabilities are functional only where the calling and called parties are on IP networks, which is rarely the case today. Because most IP phone calls still terminate on the public switched network, the protocol mediation capabilities of the softswitch will be needed for the foreseeable future to bridge those two networks. However, there is a potential for the role of the softswitch to diminish over time.

New Partners

During the past year, the softswitch vendor space has seen considerable consolidation. Among the notable purchases are Sonus Networks Inc.'s (www.sonusnetworks.com) acquisition of telecom technologies inc. (www.telecomtechnologies.com) a purchase that added considerable Class 5 functionality to the already well-received Sonus Class 4 products.

telecom technologies also brought a lively interoperability effort involving more than 50 vendors, many of whom had gone through testing in tti's labs. While consolidation of that acquisition is ongoing, it is expected that Sonus will demonstrate a greatly expanded new softswitch technology at SUPERCOMM.

Another big player that made a significant acquisition is Cisco Systems Inc. (www.cisco.com) which picked up IPCell (www.ipcell.com), a small but respected developer of a softswitch that also reportedly had extensive Class 5 features.

While Cisco has not said officially that it will have a new softswitch at SUPERCOMM, it was showing the BTS 10200, derived from IPCell, on the VON show floor.

"We don't want to do an official announcement for a couple of months," says Catherine Stewart, PR manager at Cisco. "We are targeting SUPERCOMM or a later unveiling."

Clarent Corp. (www.clarent.com), which has been a market leader in voice gateways, mostly for toll-bypass applications, has added a softswitch, the Call Manager, to its local-access product family. In February, Clarent split its products into three lines of business: the traditional long-distance carriers, enterprises and the newest area, local access.

That softswitch will be shown at SUPERCOMM paired with a new, large next-generation-network gateway that Mark McIlvane, executive vice president, characterizes as "telco-hardened."

Clarent currently supports H.323 and, while the company says it can work with other gateways, the Clarent product is primarily a closed solution. That may change when the company introduces SIP functionality, an addition that could be announced at SUPERCOMM, though it is not officially on Clarent's list of show announcements.

Protocols and Apps

Telcordia Technologies Inc. (www.telcordia.com), which makes a Class 5 softswitch, called the Call Agent, plans to announce details of an initiative with Sun Microsystems Inc. (www.sun.com) to develop a JAIN (Java APIs for intelligent networks) interface for its softswitch.

Telcordia and Sun previously announ- ced the JAIN JCC API, which provides a unified call-processing interface that lets software developers write a single service application using call control across heterogeneous networks.

At VON, Telcordia announced expanded scalability for its softswitch, showing a version of the Call Agent that can scale from 200,000 lines to 500,000 lines. The softswitch also added an accounting server and an announcement server.

At SUPERCOMM, VocalData Inc. (www.vocaldata.com) will announce new features for its VOISS (Voice Over IP Softswitch), including two voice services in addition to the product's existing hosted PBX service.

The company also plans to announce applications, interoperability with three providers of IADs and two IP phone partnerships. The company also is adding SIP and (MGCP) media gateway control protocol to its IP proxy firewall. Currently, the protocols are specific to the end points, such as Cisco's SCCP, which is specific to its IP phones.

ipVerse Inc. (www.ipverse.com), which already has released details of its Class 5 softswitch, says that it expects to announce customer wins at SUPERCOMM.

Nuera Communications Inc. (www.nuera.com) whose gateway has found favor with the cable industry, plans to announce SS7 capability for its Class 4 softswitch. The SS7 capability provides an interface to the PSTN that is superior to the (CAS) call-associated signaling interfaces often used today, says Neil Salisbury, vice president of marketing for Nuera.

"Most softswitches are going to have to have that," Salisbury says. Nuera has written an MGCP state machine to use the call control from SS7.

"SS7 needs a master/slave protocol, so we have to do it with MGCP," Salisbury says. "You can't do it with SIP, which is peer-to-peer. But the softswitch still talks SIP to the applications."

Nuera also may announce some interoperability efforts with application servers, and it may show new enhanced services on applications servers.

Taqua Systems Inc. (www.taqua.com), which makes a softswitch/gateway combination with a TDM switching fabric, will introduce a SIP interface and high-speed network interfaces, such as T3 and ATM OC-3.

The Application Servers

The essential adjunct to the softswitch is the application server, and in many instances, the distinction blurs. Application servers incorporate call control capabilities, and many softswitches are configured with applications.

IPeria Inc. (www.iperia.com), which offers a fully featured application server product group, expects to announce a large customer win at SUPERCOMM. In the meantime, the company is working on its SIP interoperability, notably with Sonus and NexTone Communi- cations Inc. (www.nextone.com), which makes an application server that it calls an application switch. IPeria will show the result of its recently announced partnerships with Tellabs Inc. (www.tellabs.com) for gateways and ipVerse Inc. for its softswitch. The combination of the three companies' technologies will provide an end-to-end IP voice system for a carrier, which the companies will integrate to take that sometimes onerous burden off the shoulders of service providers.

NexTone also has announced a partnership with VegaStream Ltd. (www.vegastream.com), a maker of VoIP gateways "that are both SIP and H.323, to help service providers bridge from one network to another," says Raj Sharma, President, CEO of NexTone.

VegaStream will add another essential element to the end-to-end solution: customer premises equipment.

"Now we will have Tellabs for the media gateways, and the partnership with ipVerse for call control and our application switch," Sharma notes.

The solution will be sold through Tellabs' sales force.

"They own the customer, and we are part of the solution," says Sharma. The companies will make joint sales calls, in part because potential customers are taking a greater interest in applications than in the early days of IP voice.

"So even for Tellabs, they want to see applications because that is what drives their media gateway business," Sharma says.

Telco Systems (www.telco.com) will announce at SUPERCOMM the availability of the new EdgeLinkT5Pro IP switching platform. It has 10/100 mbps, gigabit Ethernet and VDSL capability on the customer side, and can encapsulate IP packets onto a SONET payload for transport over a carrier's fiber optic facilities. The addition, of Layer 3 routing support and virtual LAN capability provides a high degree of LAN to WAN efficiency. It can be equipped with OC-3 or OC-12 SONET network interfaces.

Adax Inc. (www.adax.com) will showcase the latest addition to its Adax Protocol Software product portfolio--the SCTP/T at SUPERCOMM. The product is based on the Internet Engineering Task Force-defined protocol known as SCTP (IETF RFC2960), which was created to provide the same signaling quality and integrity to the Internet or VPNs that switched-circuit networks provide today. It also offers features that are not included in the protocol. The protocol provides flexibility in sequencing (ordered/unordered data delivery) and multiplexing (bundling/fragmentation of user data). The software delivers voice-grade quality and reliability without burdening the server's system CPU, because its operations are split between the kernel and the on-board processor(s), with the on-board processor taking over heartbeat processing, path-failure detection, Adler/32 bit checksum and CRC calculations, encryption, nonrepudiation and authentication. With Adax SCTP/T, error detection (RTO.Min) can be set to as low as 0.1 second, which is 10 times faster than the standard recommends. And the software provides frequent heartbeat monitoring of 10-20 alternate transport addresses for each association. With the possibility of setting heartbeat intervals (HB.interval) at 0.5 second, which is 60 times more frequent than the standard recommends, SCTP/T makes it possible to maintain/assess the quality of 10-20 alternate transport addresses. Based on information gathered from the polling of alternate paths, SCTP/T uses Smoothed Link Quality monitoring algorithm to update a path-availability matrix that allows the fast selection of new paths of the highest quality after path failure and link outage.

Rapid5 Networks (www.rapid5.com) will demonstrate its RCP-700 at SUPERCOMM. Slated for availability this summer, the RCP-700 addresses the problem of Internet traffic overloading the PTSN infrastructure. The RCP-700 offloads Internet traffic before it hits the first switch. The product's architecture combines advanced digital signal processing technology with simultaneous data and TDM switch fabric access. It integrates highly scalable narrowband and broadband remote access servers (RAS), as well as access, trunk, VoIP, VoDSL and VoATM gateway functionality.

Liebert Corp. (www.liebert.com) will unleash a flurry of new products at SUPERCOMM. Among them will be Foundation, an enclosure that acts as a simple durable rack enclosure or a fully integrated "mini computer room" system. The Foundation Enclosure can be customized with adjustable mounting rails, multiple door options and cable access and management for organization and security. Further options create the Foundation Mini Computer Room for continuous systems availability with integrated computer-grade air conditioning, power protection, monitoring and security in a sealed enclosure. The Mini Computer Room, for critical network systems and components, provides a quick deployment computer room that can be relocated or expanded to fit changing requirements. Pricing starts at $1,000. Also to be shown at SUPERCOMM will be Liebert's recently announced GXT 2U family of high-availability uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) in 700 VA, 1,000 VA, 1,500 VA, 2 kVA and 3 kVA sizes. The GXT 2U provides power protection, internal battery backup, and an optional output distribution and maintenance bypass module, all packaged in a 2U compact and lightweight design. The Npower 3-phase UPS, meanwhile, is an uninterruptible power system in a mid-sized system (30-130kVA) designed for data center and telecom environments. Also at the show will be Interceptor II, a surge suppression (TVSS) line for almost any application or environment.

Cirronet Inc. (www.cirronet.com) will show its WaveBolt family of broadband wireless products. The products operate in the 2.4 since GHz unlicensed frequency and offer line-of-site range up to 15 km. The WaveBolt fixed wireless access system consists of one or more access points located at the ISP's PoPs--usually a tall building or radio tower--and the CPE. The CPE, which integrates a microwave antenna, radio and modem, is packaged as a small, hand-sized device. Placed up to 150 feet from the PC, the CPE connects to a PC's serial port--RS-232 or USB interface--via the system's standard serial cable. Avoiding complicated in-home installations, the WaveBolt system uses the dial-up networking routines that are part of Microsoft Windows to establish an always-on subscriber connection. The WaveBolt subscriber system is designed for easy mounting on a building's exterior to obtain line of sight with the ISP access point. Because the antenna can listen and transmit over more than a 90-degree arc (more than 1/4 of a circle), the antenna need only be aimed in the general direction of the access point. In tests, Cirronet found the WaveBolt system could still receive a signal from one and a half miles away with the antenna turned backwards. The system has a line-of-site range of up to ten miles, but Cirronet recommends three to five miles for best results. Access points connect to the ISP network through a standard 10/100BaseT interface. With a built-in four-port hub, multiple units may be collocated to simultaneously support close to 1,000 subscribers per PoP.

Eastern Research Inc. (www.erinc.com) at the show will introduce GR303 RDT System functionality within its DNX Multiservice Access Concentrators. The additional functionality enables the DNX-11 to support selective, dynamic voice over-subscription in accordance with the Telcordia GR303 standard, while retaining its ability to groom multiservice traffic by performing static 3-1-0 cross connections. Network service providers are seeking to leverage GR303-based Integrated Digital Loop Carrier (IDLC) systems to reduce capital outlay and operating expense for both their back-haul facilities and Class 4/5 switch ports. These benefits are derived from the ability to support many more subscribers via a fewer number of Integrated Digital Terminal--Remote Digital Terminal (IDT-RDT) facilities. A GR303-equipped DNX-11 Multiservice Access Concentrator addresses the demands of today's service providers for all digital and higher bandwidth links on both sides of the RDT by providing a selection of facility-facing and subscriber-facing narrowband and broadband interfaces, including T1, T3, STS1 and OC-3, in a single interface group. The DNX supports up to an entire T3/STS1 on the IDT facility port and a mix of up to 2,024 DS0s (CRVs) on the subscriber side. The DNX GR303 RDT System processes and manages all call-setup and teardown operations on a real-time basis via GR303 compliant communications channels and protocols between itself and the target IDT (Class 5 Switch). The Embedded Operations Channel (EOC) and Timeslot Management Channel (TMC), each occupying a single DS0 of bandwidth, are utilized to control inbound and outbound call operations. Both EOC and TMC path protection is provided, plus optional 1:1 processor protection is also available.

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