VoIP Swims Upstream

Lucent Technologies in late May announced it had agreed to acquire privately held alternative switch vendor Telica for $295 million in stock and options, plus additional employee-related cash payments.

Marketed under the PLUS brand name, Telica products include the Telica Plexus 9000 Media Gateway, PLUS Signaling Gateway and PLUS Media Gateway Controller. Telica has 50 customers. These products will be marketed and sold as part of Lucent’s Accelerate portfolio, which was announced last November. Accelerate solutions help service providers deliver IP-based voice, data and multimedia services, such as streaming video, to their subscribers over wireless and wireline networks.

This acquisition — Lucent’s first since 2000 — gives Lucent a viable VoIP gateway to add to its Accelerate portfolio at a time when large customers like Verizon, which has already named Nortel Networks as a VoIP supplier, are moving on VoIP deployments.

Meanwhile, MetaSwitch, a division of Data Connection, which is known as a leading provider of protocol stacks, last month unveiled the VP3510, which was demoed at SUPERCOMM.A new version of MetaSwitch’s TDM/packet-based Class 5 switch alternative, the VP3510 in its first debut will be able to handle 7,392 simultaneous calls. A future version is expected to triple chassis capacity.

While MetaSwitch has never focused on the RBOCs and doesn’t intend to, Andy Randall, the company’s vice president of marketing, says the VP3510 does allow it to “step up to larger telcos, including CLECs and independent telcos with 100,000-plus line counts.

The new product will start at around $200,000 for small deployments.

In addition to increasing the capacity of its switch, MetaSwitch began selling a single card for the chassis that supports ATM, TDM and IP, in May. The card includes full codec capability on all channels and echo cancellation for up to 672 simultaneous calls.

Later this year, MetaSwitch plans to offer the ability to decouple its softswitch/call agent functionality from the application server and other parts of the softswitch model. That will take the switch up to hundreds of thousands of subscribers, says Randall, adding that the distributed architecture will enable carriers to manage multiple boxes as a single virtual switch.

MetaSwitch, whose existing switch is now in nearly 50 deployments, also plans to provide in its next release SIP integration with application servers to support prepaid messaging and conferencing applications.

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