Cisco Discusses Voice Enhancements, Customers

Cisco Systems Inc. has announced today that carriers in the Asia Pacific, Europe and North America are delivering IP-based services using Cisco Broadband Local Integrated Services Solution (BLISS), the Cisco Voice Infrastructure and Applications (VIA) transport services framework, and two Cisco Managed Voice Services (MVS) solutions.

“Cisco is more than any other vendor capable of taking the end-to-end view of how do I as an enterprise customer take benefits of deploying an IP telephony solution, but to look toward the service provider to offer a range of managed services offerings to me,” says John Shaw, Cisco’s director of marketing.

FastWeb and Bredbandsbolaget (B2) are among those using Cisco BLISS, which is an integrated solution that addresses IP-based services over metro Ethernet, cable and T1/E1. Cisco BLISS Metro Ethernet enables service providers to deliver high-speed Internet, local and long-distance voice and video services, and hosted services such as network-based file storage. Key components of Cisco BLISS Metro Ethernet include the access infrastructure, call control servers, public switched telephone network interconnect through SS7, and customer premises equipment.

Service providers such as ITXC and SingTel have deployed voice services based on Cisco VIA, a solution that helps carriers cost-effectively deploy scalable IP-based voice transit services over a core IP transport infrastructure. Cisco recently unveiled three advancements to the VIA offering: The Cisco PGW 2200 softswitch has been integrated into the existing H.323 architecture, enabling full MGCP-based call control and supporting 90 SS7 variants. The Cisco SIP Proxy Server has been incorporated, adding support for an array of SIP-based applications such as Microsoft Network (MSN) Messenger Voice Service. In addition, Cisco VIA now provides better operational efficiencies through improved network management featuring Cisco Internet OSS for VoIP Infrastructure Manager. This network management solution allows service providers to turn up services more quickly, optimize network availability and measure usage for both efficiency and effective billing and revenue recognition.

Using Cisco’s Multiservice Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Cisco’s Managed IP Telephony solutions, Equant and Sprint have delivered a set of bundled Managed Voice Services for their business customers that are seeking to outsource the ongoing management of their IP voice, data and video communications. By employing the Cisco Multiservice VPN offering, service providers can offer cost-effective inter-site voice, data and video IP communications over a QoS-enabled network. Additionally, they can provide closed user group dialing services as well as “off-net” long distance calling through SS7 and ISDN. The Cisco Managed IP Telephony solution provides the operational support tools service providers need to offer ongoing management oversight for their customer’s Cisco IP Telephony deployments. From the service provider’s network operations center, they can now offer support services such as configuration management, performance and capacity oversight, fault monitoring, help desk, and reporting.

All of these voice solutions are available today.

Pricing is dependent on each customer deployment approach.

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