FFMC: One Number, MC: One Number, MMany Phones? any … · the many changes in the service-provider market–from mergers and acquisitions to new service offerings and technological

Over 62,000 SubscribersOver 62,000 Subscribers

MARCH/APRIL 2008 • VOL 6 NO. 2www.vonmag.com

NOW INCORPORATING

VON Pioneer:VON Pioneer:Thomas Pincince,Thomas Pincince, Founder, Brix NetworksFounder, Brix NetworksTesting GeniusTesting Genius

FMC: One Number, FMC: One Number, Many Phones?Many Phones? Service Creation Service Creation EnvironmentEnvironmentss– – Not Just for Carriers Not Just for Carriers Mobile TV: The Mobile TV: The Battle Is Brewing Battle Is Brewing Transitioning Global Transitioning Global Carriers to All-IPCarriers to All-IP Femtos: Carriers’ Femtos: Carriers’ Last Battlefi eldLast Battlefi eld

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mailto:[email protected]

MARCH/APRIL 2008 • VON MAGAZINE 1WWW.VONMAG.COM

2EditorialSteady Building Already Driven by Broadbandby Doug Mohney

Publisher’s NoteVirtual and Face-to-Face VON.xby Bill Sell

6This Just OutNews and the latest products.

What Works At Work14 Grinding Out a

Phone Solution26 Telx Lights the Life

Aquatic 28 Codima Mapping

BT Ireland’s Network in Real Time by Greg Tally

18The Pioneers of VON®

Thomas Pincince, Founder, CEO, Brix Networksby Doug Mohney

23FMC: One Number, Many Phones?by Ken Camp

29Euro InnovationMobile TV: A Classical Battle Is Brewingby Bob Emmerson

30All-IP Carrier NetworksTransitioning the biggest machine in the world is a huge task.by Bob Emmerson

32Violent FemtosFemtocells make a lot of sense, both as an access tool to increase coverage and as a leverage point to get into the home–the converged carrier’s last battlefield.

by Ross O’Brien

34SIP It UpFinally, a real conversion of TDM voice-centric business models that will transform the nature of enterprise-telecom services.by Ross O’Brien

37Spotlight on MicroTCAMicroTCA for Enterprise: A Developing Kid with Huge Potentialby Greg Tally

38Spotlight on SCEMaking the Bits Work Together–Service Creation Environmentsby Doug Mohney

40 The 2008 VON Magazine Innovator Awards

45VON Magazine’s Marketplace

46 Focus on Unified CommunicationsUnified Communications Deployment Modelsby Don Van Doren

47 It’s All about the AppsThe Consistency of Voiceby Thomas Howe

48 The Edge-CentricTen Internet Talking Points for the Next U.S. Presidentby David S. Isenberg

Cover and internal Pioneer photography by Mark Till.www.marktill.com

Contents

MARCH/APRIL 2008 • VOLUME 6, NUMBER 2

VON Magazine(TM) (ISSN#: 1547-6251), is published bi-monthly by Pulvermedia, Inc., 5215 N. Sabino Canyon Rd, Tucson, AZ 85750-6435. Periodical postage paid at Tucson, AZ and additional mailing offi ces. All subscription address changes can be made online at www.vonmag.com/subscribe US POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: VON Magazine, 115 Broad Hollow Rd, Suite 225, Melville, NY, 11747. Subscription rate in the US and Canada: $29.00 per year and all other foreign subscriptions: $99.00 (all payments in US funds.)

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2 VON MAGAZINE • MARCH/APRIL 2008 WWW.VONMAG.COM

Virtual and Face-to-Face VON.x

Like clockwork, every couple of years someone picks up the war cry of “100 Mbps Nationwide” and holds it up as a panacea to all of our social and economic ills. The theory is that our country’s household broadband connectivity sucks relative to other (geographically less spread out) nations such as Japan, France, and Korea, and all we need is more bits to the doorstep of each household to ensure economic prosperity. Build it, and we enable distance learning, telework, telemedicine, and lots more.

EDUCAUSE is the latest on the soapbox, proposing a mini-mum of 100 Mbps with a price tag of $100 billion to be equally split between the federal government, states, and a private or public entity that would actually build and maintain the net-work. Former FCC Chairman and long-time VON participant Reed Hundt has been on this bandwagon since at least 2003, and he’s more recently pegged the price tag on fi ber to the home to be $20 to 25 billion of late; back in 2004, it was $50 to 100 billion of everyone else’s money.

I just can’t see a “Big Dig” project like this being undertaken, regardless of who sits in the White House in 2009. But I also don’t think it will be necessary.

The home broadband duopoly of cable and (wired) telecom is on the verge of making the leap from under 50 Mbps speeds to 100 Mbps+ over the next year. Cable is starting to feel the heat by losing video customers to AT&T and Verizon, so they are al-ready planning to move up to 100 Mbps (and faster) speeds using DOCSIS 3.0. Arris and Cisco announced CPE at CES, so we’re not talking wishful thinking.

Meanwhile AT&T and Verizon lose dial-tone customers to cable companies, so they need to capture broadband customers, hence higher speeds. Verizon’s FiOS, scorned by the shortsighted of Wall Street, has the potential to support up to 200 Mbps broadband to the home under its current GPON incarnation, and they’re already looking at ways to go still faster. What will cable’s next move be?

Maybe we don’t even need no stinkin’ fi xed connections. Verizon Wireless is bringing LTE to America, pushing wireless broadband speeds over 150 Mbps. Some would argue that greater mobility trumps the highest available tethered speeds; the 2012 generation of broadband mobile phone users may end up laugh-ing at Grandpa’s fi ber connection!

All of this higher speed broadband will also result in steady up-grades to the supporting networks, so high-speed core network companies will have plenty of business in the years ahead. John Chambers at Cisco believes they have another decade of network upgrades of growth in support of video and visual networking. Add it all up, and Americans may get to 100 Mbps per household without heavy government intervention. V

Doug Mohney can be reached at [email protected].

by Doug Mohney, Editor-in-Chief

Steady Building Already Driven by Broadband

Editorial Publisher’s Note

During the past few months we’ve watched the con-solidation in our industry continue–but it definitely isn’t spelling the end to innovation. Innovation is alive and well, and this month we’re seeing it here in the magazine with dozens of VON Innovators Awards finalists being announced; we’re seeing it online through daily stories carried in von:focus and online at vonmag.com; and we’re seeing it live and in-person at the Spring VON.x Conference and Expo and San Jose, home to more than 200 companies and new products.

VON, now in its 12th year, continues to track and report on the many changes in the service-provider market–from mergers and acquisitions to new service offerings and technological breakthroughs. Returning at our VON.x conference in March in San Jose is the ever-popular Town Meeting, hosted by lawyer, blogger, and now law professor Jonathan Askin. The VON Town Meeting takes place Monday, March 17 at 5 p.m.

The evolution of VON continues. You’re seeing us call it VON.x now–with the X being the wild card XoIP factor. XoIP represents the spectrum of Internet communications, and VON has always been home to the Internet communications continuum…your solutions, year-round.

In the coming weeks even the VON organization is launching something new: our first VON Virtual Tradeshow, taking place live on the Internet on May 7 and 8 (www.vonvirtual.com). While online programs can never take away the many benefits of face-to-face interaction, it can help round out the information- gathering and business needs of our marketplace. About a dozen conference sessions will take place and can be viewed very much like webinars are today, and several dozen exhibit “booths” will be featured. Attendees not only see product information and demos in these booths, they can also initiate instant message (IM) chat sessions with engineering and sales personnel from these companies. Unlike face-to-face, where most conversations with booth staff are one-on-one, the power of Internet communications enables one vendor representative to address several attendees at once. VON Virtual is not a replacement for print, e-mailed news, or face-to-face conferences; it’s simply another great tool in our mix of information services to keep you updated with innovat-ion in Internet communications worldwide.

If you are a von:focus subscriber or a frequent visitor to our companion Web site vonmag.com hopefully you’ve noticed im-provements in not just the amount of coverage but also the ex-panded breadth. We’ve added microsites on important technolo-gies, and we’ve added vertical editions of von:focus. Your feed-back on how VON is meeting your needs is always welcome. Call or e-mail any time. V

Bill Sell can be reached at [email protected] or +1 631-961-1070.

by Bill Sell, Publisher


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Serving:

© 2007–2008 AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved. AT&T and the AT&T logo are trademarks of AT&T Intellectual Property.

Your customers demand you go the extra mile. Why stop there?Access 547,000 route miles of fiber worldwide with global networking from AT&T.

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4 VON MAGAZINE • JAN/FEB 2008 WWW.VONMAG.COM

EditorialEditor-in-Chief Doug [email protected] Features Editor Greg [email protected] European Editor Bob Emmerson [email protected]/Pacifi c Editor Ross O’Brien [email protected] Editor Karen [email protected]

ColumnistsKen Camp ipadventures Bob Frankston Frankston Innovating Thomas Howe The Thomas Howe Company David Isenberg isen.com Ed Mier MierConsultingDon Van Doren Vanguard CommunicationsJim Van Meggelen Core Telecom Innovations

ArtArt Director Derek Davalos [email protected] c Manager Garry [email protected]

Marketing Manager Briana Lorenz-Marrow [email protected]

AdvertisingVice President, Integrated MediaPaul Agranat (631) 961-1105 or [email protected], Business DevelopmentDerek Jenkins (631) 961-8994 or [email protected] Director of Worldwide Advertising SalesDebbie Holmgren (Companies N-Z)(408) 376-0963 or [email protected] Advertising Sales ManagerCindi Richardson (Companies A-M & #’s)(661) 297-4027 or [email protected]

Corporate StaffPublisher and Editorial Director William R. Sell (631) 961-1070 [email protected]

SubscriptionsAnnual subscriptions to VON Magazine are US $29.00 in the US and Canada and US $99.00 delivered to the rest of the world. Payment is due in advance for all orders, in US dollars and can be made at: www.vonmag.com/subscribe. To change your postal address: www.vonmag.com/subscribe. For customer service: [email protected]

Reader InputVON Magazine™ encourages reader input of all kinds. All submissions are eligible for publication unless otherwise stated by the author. We reserve the right to edit submissions. All submissions become the property of VON Magazine™.

A Pulvermedia Inc. publicationCopyright 2008 Pulvermedia Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in full or in part without permission is prohibited. VON Magazine, The Voice of IP Communications, VON and Voice on the Net are trade marks and registered service marks of Pulvermedia Inc. Subscribe online for free at: www.vonmag.com/subscribe

Your best source for complete industry information, back issues of VON Magazine, information on the VON Magazine Innovators Award, our Buyer’s Guide, and many Web exclusives. Vonmag.

com also includes hundreds of pages of information on over a dozen technologies in the IP communications marketplace. Vonmag.com is updated continually and is the ideal starting point for any news and information

gathering about all things Internet communications.

Your daily e-mail update on news and product information from the world of IP communications. To subscribe, go to http://von mag.com/von-focus-newsletter.html. “von:focus,” our opt-in e-mail newsletter has a global circulation of 95,200. Published every Tuesday and Friday and edited by Editor-in-Chief Doug Mohney, it highlights the most important news of the day with commentary and perspective from our editorial team and the VON Advisory Board.

“von:focus on” is our series of vertically focused e-mail newsletters targeting marketing including enterprise, hardware, networking, video, unifi ed communications, FMC (fi xed-mobile convergence) and open-source telephony.

Pulvermedia is the leading integrated media company serving the IP communications industry, building communities, and providing ready marketplace access through its unparalleled blend of trade shows, publications, Web channels, and progressive cutting-edge media. And as the foremost integrated media company, Pulvermedia is ideally poised to deliver a vast range of messages to a wide variety of audiences, including technology buyers and sellers, government regulators, industry analysts, luminaries, pundits, and bloggers. For more information, please visit www.pulvermedia.com.

2008 Pulvermedia events are currently scheduled for San Jose, Boston, Mexico City, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, and Rome.







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Radware Introduces Fully SIP-Aware Application Delivery ControllerRadware (www.radware.com) has added SIP Director, a fully SIP-aware applica-tion delivery controller (ADC) to its application delivery product suite. Based on the company’s AppDirector and de-signed specifi cally for SIP-based applica-tions, SIP Director provides health mon-itoring, fall-over and disaster recovery, in-depth SIP message analysis for traffi c routing, enhanced security, an integrated SIP proxy, and transport translation between common SIP transports (TCP, UDP, TLS). An easy-to-use confi guration interface means no coding or scripting is required.

MetaSwitch Introduces Management System with Diagnostic Capabilities, Desktop ClientMetaSwitch (www.metaswitch.com) has released the MetaView Management System, a management system with network diagnostic capabilities. The system provides fault management across multiple network elements, in-cluding MetaSwitch and MetaSphere SDP (service delivery platform) and ap-plications servers, and select third-party

equipment. It also includes a new call diagnostics capability to supplement MetaSwitch’s management systems, a SOAP/XML provisioning model to enable easy automation and integra-tion into third-party management sys-tems, and the collation of real-time IP voice-quality statistics from the media gateway and other VoIP equipment to produce a graphical display of network-wide voice quality.

The MetaSwitch CommAssistant desktop client works in tandem with the company’s existing CommPortal application and the MetaSphere SDP to deliver an easy-to-use desktop te-lephony experience. CommAssistant can be used by subscribers either on a MetaSwitch softswitch or a legacy Class 5 switch. The Windows applica-tion includes a toolbar on the Windows task bar to provide instant access to the most common voice telephony func-tions including presence status updates, searching contacts lists, placing calls using click-to-dial, and changing set-tings of calling features such as call forwarding and do-not-disturb. Other features include click-to-dial support within applications such as Microsoft Outlook, remote offi ce support, and a notifi cation icon in the Windows sys-tem tray for new voice and fax messages.

APEX Announces SIP Proxy and Presence Server for OMNIVOX3DAPEX Voice Communications (www.apexvoice.com) has an-nounced the availability of a SIP Proxy and Presence Server (PPS) for its OmniVox3D Application Server. Consisting

of a SIP proxy server, registrar, XCAP functions, and the IETF-compliant SIMPLE presence engine, the PPS can be deployed as a server component of any presence-aware SIP-based communica-tion and collaboration service, including instant messaging/voice/video/conferenc-ing, IP PBX, Web collaboration, and vid-eoconferencing. In addition to core SIP and SIMPLE support, the OmniVox3D SIP PPS implements XCAP functions for server-side resource management such as buddy lists; the Proxy Server also has media proxy capabilities.

This Just Out

NEW PRODUCTSExciting new products and services on the converged network.

S O F T W A R E

Voxeo Announces General Availability of Designer 8Voxeo (www.voxeo.com) has announced the general availability of Voxeo Designer 8, the Web-native voice-application de-velopment tool. Designer 8 uses dynamic HTML and AJAX to improve the usability and performance of its Web-based user interface. It also features improved call fl ow-chart visualization including zoom and pan capabilities, a new “tree view” that is similar to Windows Explorer, the ability to import and export projects be-tween Voxeo-hosted and premise deploy-ments, enhanced support for dynamically storing audio recorded during calls, and updates to support the latest Web service standards including SOAP, WSDL, and XML Schema.


http://www.radware.com

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Avaya Enhances SIP in Communications ManagerAvaya (www.avaya.com) has incorpo-rated a number of SIP enhancements into Communications Manager 5.0. The software now features embedded SIP, al-lowing co-residency on a single server. New SIP trunk alternate routing is also available. There is new SIP fi rmware for Avaya endpoints. Mobility features are also SIP-enabled, such as Extension-to-Cellular, which transparently bridges a user’s cell phone with their phone extension, and SIP Visiting User, which lets users log into and access their desk phone features from any phone on the network. A new version of the Avaya Video Telephony Solution is also now SIP-enabled, providing a more cost-effective way to deploy enterprise-class videoconferencing. Enhancements al-low users to handle “ad hoc” video calls in the same way as voice calls, simply adding and forwarding both voice and video, and creating videoconferences for up to six people. A new software main-tenance model is also available.

NewStep Extends Enterprise FMC CapabilitiesNewStep Networks (www.newstep.com) has released CSN 3.5, the latest version of its enterprise fi xed-mobile convergence platform. New features include support for SIP Presence inte-gration, integration with enterprise ap-plications, including Microsoft’s Offi ce Communication Server 2007, along with a broadened range of IP-PBX support

and an enhanced enterprise seamless roaming client for Windows Mobile 6 devices, including automatic reconfi gu-ration and optimal call routing based on location. The release also includes fl ex-ible user confi gurations for users to de-velop ringing profi les, including options for sequential ringing, simultaneous ring, and staggered ringing, as well as time-of-day/day-of-week call routing.

Fonality, Dell Team on IP PBXDell Computers (www.dell.com) has teamed with Fonality (www.fonality.com) to offer an IP PBX for the small to medium-sized business market. Based on the Dell OptiPlex 300 desktop server, the Fonality PBX is targeted at busi-nesses from fi ve to 125 employees and will be sold exclusively by Dell directly and through its reseller channel. Four SKUs have been set up: one for VoIP only; one for analog; one for PRI; and one for PRI+analog. All the variants will support up to 50 concurrent phone calls and up to 150 extensions. The Fonality solution includes autodiscovery and complete touchless auto provisioning. Users will simply have to plug in and boot up the server, then plug in the appropriate model SIP phone into the Ethernet network; the server automati-cally confi gures the phone and assigns

it the next available extension. Dell will sell the Aastra 4 and Aastra 9 series of IP phones, along with Polycom’s IP 4000 Soundstation SIP Conference phone (www.polycom.com) to complement the Fonality solution.

Digium Unveils MarketplaceDigium (www.digium.com) has unveiled the “Digium Asterisk Marketplace” to give the Asterisk community of end us-ers, developers, small businesses, and enterprises a one-stop online destination for all their open-source VoIP deploy-ment needs. Located at www.digium.com/marketplace, the Marketplace en-hances Digium’s Technology Partners

This Just Out

Avaya Adds SIP to Contact Center SolutionsAvaya (www.avaya.com) has announced new contact center solutions that include new SIP capabilities benefi ting all facets of a contact center, including IT administrators, customer service agents working anywhere, and customers. Avaya’s new solution now provides end-to-end SIP running from the service provider trunk to an agent’s desktop phone. A new low-cost Avaya SIP phone that doesn’t require CTI middleware completes the end-to-end solution. A new SIP-based video self-service solution gives customers the ability to use video-based menus and access content using a 3G mobile device, video kiosk, or PC. Customers can see branded visual menus to choose options, or they can view videos while waiting for an agent.

The new SIP contact center phone–Avaya Agent Deskphone 16CC–gives agents es-sential contact center features while providing a foundation for evolving with pres-ence-based capabilities such as identifying real-time availability of experts. The phone can be set up in an agent’s home via a secure VPN for home-based agents. Other critical contact center capabilities are now available via SIP trunks as an alternative to existing ISDN trunks including the ability to pass customer calls and secure information between contact centers.

O P E N S O U R C E


http://www.avaya.com

http://www.avaya.com

http://www.dell.com

http://www.polycom.com

http://www.digium.com


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NEW PRODUCT DEMONSTRATIONS!Catch exciting new approaches and getanswers to real-world issues with these thirtyminute presentations demonstrating the latest

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Day 1 Tuesday, March 18, 20081:00 - 1:30 PM VoIP Security…Delivered - AT&T Wholesale

1:30 - 2:00 PM Brix Networks

2:00 - 2:30 PM Polycom

2:30 - 3:00 PM Panasonic

3:00 - 4:00 PM IMTC Forum: What Do You Do When There Isn’t A Standard?

4:00 - 5:00 PM IMS Forum Results

Day 2 Wednesday, March 19, 200810:15 - 11:00 AM Gordon Cook

11:00 - 11:30 AM VideoSMS: Can You See Me Now? - NMS Communications

11:30 - 12:00 PM Outsourcing vs. Building a Voice Solutions In-House & ROI for ISPs

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Endeavor TelecomFaxBackGlobalPOPsGrande CommunicationsGrandstream NetworksHEAD AcousticsiBasisInfineon TechnologiesInnoMedia, Inc.IntelliverseIP Unity GlenayreIxiaLEA ConsultantsLinksysMacadamianMetaSwitchMu SecurityNetwork IP

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11:00 - 11:45 AM Ethics and a Guide to Expand Your Business

11:45 - 12:15 PM Happy Birthday Y2K

1:00 - 2:00 PM Getting Beyond Middleware - Vendor Partners Can Be Key to Your Growth

2:00 - 3:00 PM Selling VoIP to SMBs: The Latest Market Research Results Show the Path to Success

3:00 - 3:30 PM IP-PBX,Video, SIP Phones,ATAs & Key Systems

3:30 - 4:00 PM Making the Connection to Profitability - SIP Trunking

4:00 - 4:30 PM Maintaining Profitability by Offering Maintenance (Part 1) - Exploring Authorized Solutions

4:30 - 5:00 PM Maintaining Profitability by Offering Maintenance (Part 2) - Understanding Independent Approaches

Day 2 Wednesday, March 19, 200810:30 - 12:30 PM Channel Strategies for Profitability and Growth

1:00 - 2:00 PM Bundling With the Carrier Partners for Single Service Solutions

2:30 - 3:00 PM Recession-Proof Your Business

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This Just Out

Web portal to allow companies that are not yet Digium partners to advertise their products to the Asterisk ecosystem. Visitors will be able to search the com-pany listings by keyword to easily fi nd Asterisk-compatible products such as phones, network infrastructure devices, and application software, as well as ser-vices such as VoIP and PSTN providers.

3Com Extends Open Service Networking Capabilities3Com Corporation (www.3com.com) has introduced several new open-services networking (OSN) applications on the company’s new MSR Series Multi-Service Router platform. The Multi-Service Router with OSN is designed for deploy-ment at enterprise branch and regional offi ces and by managed service providers

seeking to enhance business continuity, security, and operational effi ciency. On the router, applications run on open services modules (OSM) for the deployment of a variety of enhanced services without the use of multiple single-task appliances.

New OSN applications include the 3Com Asterisk IP Communications platform and WAN optimization and application acceleration from Open Network Program member Expand Networks. The 3Com Asterisk VoIP so-lution is a Linux-based application that creates an IP PBX for remote branches up to 50 employees; it supports up to 25 simultaneous SIP sessions. Expand Networks WAN optimization and ap-plication acceleration improves network performance and enhances application access, adding improved performance of up to 400 percent or more.

The MSR Series Multi-Service Router family is available now. The MSR 20 Series starts at $1,050, the MSR 30 Series starts at $2,140, and pricing for the MSR 50 Series chassis starts at $6,380, with the required processor module. Pricing for the 3Com Asterisk application starts at $995.

Elma Offers 1U MicroBox Integrated MicroTCA SolutionElma Electronics (www.elma.com) is now offering its 1U MicroBox as a fully integrated solution. The solution fea-tures up to 10 mid-sized single-width modules in a compact 1U height, includ-ing six AMCs, a power module, a J-TAG Switch Module from MicroBlade and one MicroTCA carrier hub. Redundant star signaling and redundant cooling mod-ules provide extra reliability.

Performance Technology Launches New Voice-Processing ModulesPerformance Technologies (www.pt.com) has launched two new voice-processing modules. Using Centillium Communication’s Entropia III processor, the PMC531 and PMC532 provide a fl exible set of options for building blade-based solutions for voice-coding ap-

plications. Integrated with Performance Technologies’ existing CompactPCI base boards, the new modules can be utilized in media gateways, wireless in-frastructure gateways, lawful intercept, and Class 4 and 5 telecommunications switching subcomponents, all supported under the company’s NexusWare Linux operating system and development en-vironment.

U4EA Technologies Introduces Signaling GatewaysU4EA Technologies (www.u4eatech.com) has introduced the Fusion 1000 Series Signaling Gateways. The new devices facilitate the support of legacy ISDN and CAS signaling and the next-

Dialogic Adds New IP Functionality to Converged Services PlatformDialogic (www.dialogic.com) has added several new features to the company’s Converged Services Platform (CSP), in-cluding a host-based SIP stack for added design fl exibility and more robust media-processing capabilities to support IP-based applications and services such as voice and signaling services. Additional hardware includes a new Dialogic IP Network Interface Series 3 card (IPN3), which transcodes PCM-coded voice traffi c (in legacy networks) to any of the most common IP codecs in IP networks and a Dialogic Digital Signal Processing Series 2 Plus card (DSP2 Plus) with robust media-processing capabilities.

OpenMoko Unveils Neo FreeRunner Open PhoneOpenMoko (www.openmoko.com) has unveiled the Neo FreeRunner, a mass-market version of the company’s open mo-bile phone. The Neo FreeRunner includes hardware improvements including 2D/3D graphics and a faster processor to enable video and audio processing. Designed for worldwide use, the FreeRunner will come in an 850MHz tri-band and an 800 MHz tri-band confi guration. It also integrates 802.11 b/g and motion sensors to cue func-tions based upon detected user activity.Want to get the latest breaking news on open source? Visit the vonmag.com micro-site at http://vonmag.com/technology/open-source/

H A R D W A R E


http://www.3com.com

http://www.openmoko.com

http://www.elma.com

http://www.dialogic.com


http://www.pt.com

http://www.pt.com

http://www.u4eatech.com


http://vonmag.com/technology/open-source/

http://vonmag.com/technology/open-source/


generation suite of IP signaling proto-cols. The U4EA Fusion 1000 Signaling Gateways support the full range of protocol conversion. Built on indus-try-standard blade-server hardware and operating systems, the family of gateways scales from an entry-level 1U Fusion 1001 supporting up to 900 DS0s through the eight-blade Fusion 1008 to multiple 16-blade Fusion 1016s sup-porting several million DS0s. Key fea-tures of the Fusion 1000 Series include a comprehensive range of ISDN, CAS, and NGN signaling protocols, a protocol analysis tool for centralized monitoring of signaling protocols and built-in pro-tocol analyzer, and an element manager including a wide range of carrier-class diagnostic tools including visibility all the way to subscriber interfaces.

Nortel Enhances Carrier Ethernet SolutionsNortel (www.nortel.com) has enhanced its Carrier Ethernet portfolio. New PBT (provider backbone transport) gear includes the Metro Ethernet Routing Switch 8600 and two new Metro Ethernet Service Units in the 1800 portfolio. The 8600 Routing Switch in-cludes new processors for better perfor-mance and the ability to accommodate new services and advanced networking traffi c management, along with new module options to allow carriers to tai-lor deployments to their requirements. Within the Ethernet Service Units port-folio, the Metro ESU 1880 and 1860 feature enhanced capabilities optimized to provide fl exible options for the de-livery of services and aggregation ca-pabilities that provide new deployment options, and capacity that enables hun-dreds of thousands users to be served cost effectively.Breaking news on hardware is also avail-able at http://vonmag.com/hardware/

SquareLoop and Sprint Deploy Geographically Targeted Mobile Alert ServiceSquareLoop (www.squareloop.com) has partnered with Sprint to deploy the ad-

vanced features of the company’s Mobile Alert Network. The service offers ad-vanced, geographically targeted public-safety alerts to mobile phones, enabling offi cials to send messages to subscribers based on the subscriber’s actual loca-tion. SquareLoop’s LBS (location-based services) technology lets public- and private-sector offi cials send geographi-cally targeted messages to subscribers

based on their actual location as they travel. Unlike other LBS applications, SquareLoop’s Mobile Alert Network puts the intelligence in the handset to main-tain subscriber location privacy. Other features include special alert tones and vibrating cadences, support for multiple languages, message groups, and a text-to-speech version that allows delivery of a message as an audio fi le.

D2 Unveils Embedded Mobile Convergence Software for Dual-Mode PhonesD2 Technologies (www.d2tech.com) mCUE software provides a communi-cations user interface (CUI) with the company’s vPORT MP VoIP software platform for OEMs and service provid-ers delivering fi xed-mobile convergence (FMC) and unifi ed communications (UC) functionality. mCUE provides a complete embedded software framework for multimode handsets for enterprise and consumer use, such as dual-mode cellular/WiFi phones.

Java-based, the mCUE user interface provides a multi-identity, multi-session, multi-protocol engine, enabling users to

simultaneously log into multiple com-munications services such as SIP, Google Talk, Yahoo, AIM, and others. It also includes presence-centric and push-to-X control over all types of sessions, including voice, IM, SMS, and e-mail messaging.

NMS Communications Launches LiveWire MobileNMS Communications (www.nmscom munications.com) has created LiveWire, a new division of the company dedi-cated to delivering mobile personaliza-tion services to operators. The new division splits the company into two parts, NMS Communications for de-velopers and LiveWire Mobile for op-erators, with the latter being a services company. LiveWire provides a complete end-to-end service-delivery platform for personalization that encompasses user experience, content management, powerful personalization engines, and targeted marketing. Complementary marketing services deliver strategies that build subscriber service adoption and usage, providing operators with pre- and post-launch support.

Pulvermedia Announces the VON Virtual TradeshowPulvermedia (www.pulvermedia.com) will host the VON Virtual Tradeshow on May 7-8, 2008. A Virtual Conference Center allows attendees to scroll through conference program sessions, choosing live sessions they want to attend in real

This Just Out

Raketu Debuts VoIP Client for BlackBerryRaketu (www.raketu.com) has released a VoIP Web application optimized for the BlackBerry family of devices. Business users can use their devices to make international calls totally free or at Raketu’s low-cost VoIP calling rates. Additionally, business users can send SMS text messages globally, and send e-mail all from within the Raketu BlackBerry Application. The application is entirely Web-based and does not require users to download any software.

W I R E L E S S

S E R V I C E S


http://www.nortel.com

http://vonmag.com/hardware/

http://www.squareloop.com


http://www.d2tech.com

http://www.raketu.com

http://www.pulvermedia.com

http://www.nmscommunications.com

http://www.nmscommunications.com

time. Live Q&A chat opportunities will follow every session, giving attendees full access to the presenters. All sessions will be available in an on-demand format following the session for 90 days.

The VON Virtual Tradeshow features a wide mix of Internet communications products and services. Each virtual booth will be fully branded by exhibi-tors, and exhibit staff will be present for live chat sessions and identifi ed through customized avatars. Company and product information can be readily downloaded, providing attendees with a convenient opportunity to learn more about the vendors and the technologies that interest them.

A “profi le matcher” enables attend-ees to run pre-defi ned searches and to quickly fi nd information on companies, products, or other attendees. When an at-tendee enters a virtual booth, information captured during attendee registration is provided to the vendor, as is the amount of time a particular attendee spends in the booth, plus a transcript of any chat

sessions generated by the attendee. To top it off, a prize center is avail-

able where exhibitor promotions and Pulvermedia incentives are offered to attendees. The event producer and vari-ous exhibitors provide incentives for at-tendees to qualify their needs, providing valuable enticements for attendees to actively participate throughout the en-tire virtual event. For more information, visit www.vonvirtual.com, or contact Paul Agranat at [email protected].

XO Expands IP Services Portfolio, Adds New Pricing PlanXO Communications (www.xo.com) has released its IPfolio IP services offerings. The new portfolio includes the launch of the company’s IP Flex service, nationwide availability of SIP and bandwidth-based pricing for converged IP services. Unlike other pricing models based on TDM ser-vices, XO bandwidth-based pricing treats voice as just another application on the

IP port, and customers pay nothing for incremental lines or voice channels pro-visioned within the port speed they have with their service. XO IP Flex replaces the company’s XOptions Flex services bundle and offers higher speed band-width options up to 10 Mbps along with standard features such as unlimited local calling, unlimited site-to-site calling for multi-location customers, and more than 20 standard voice features.

8x8 Introduces Small Business Videoconfer-encing Solution8x8 (www.packet8.net) has introduced the Packet8 Virtual Offi ce Tango Video Adapter (VTA), an affordable desktop videoconferencing solution that en-hances the functionality of the Packet8 Virtual Offi ce hosted iPBX phone system. Packet8 Virtual Offi ce subscribers can now conduct videoconferencing directly from their personal Virtual Offi ce ex-tension. The VTA has a built-in high-resolution fi ve-inch LCD color screen

This Just Out

Revolutionary QoS-enabled

Multi-Service Business Gateways

QoS OFF

It takes proven quality to win a major golf championship andU4EA is proud to have a longassociation with PadraigHarrington, winner of the 2007British Open Championship

Delivering Unified IP Communications

QoS ON

U4EA’s patented QoS technology in action

For service providers to deliver IP communications to SMB and

enterprise customers. U4EA’s gateways ensure the secure,

reliable and cost-effective delivery of converged VoIP, data and

video services. U4EA’s Fusion Series also includes advanced

new signalling gateways for carriers to interconnect legacy with

next generation networks and equipment.

To find out more about U4EA’s winning products, visit www.u4eatech.com

Alternatively visit our booth atSpring VON.x – McEnery Convention Center, San Jose, CABooth #1227 – March 18/19


http://www.vonvirtual.com

http://www.xo.com

http://www.packet8.net




and 180-degree rotating CCD camera to deliver advanced full-motion video at up to 30 frames per second along with crisp, delay-free audio. In addition to two- or three-way videoconferencing, the Packet8 Virtual Offi ce Tango includes a built-in router, a remote surveillance mode, and integration with Microsoft Outlook. New Virtual Offi ce subscribers can purchase the Tango as a bundle with the company’s business-class speaker-phone, while existing subscribers can get the VTA as an add-on device.

Cbeyond and Toshiba Team Up to Provide SIP Trunking ServicesCbeyond (www.cbeyond.com) and Toshiba (www.telecom.toshiba.com) have teamed up to integrate Cbyond’s SIPconnect service with Toshiba’s Strata CIX family of IP business-communica-tions systems. Toshiba’s SIP trunking fea-ture puts the SIP trunk support natively into the telecommunications system; the same interface also supports IP stations, remote users, softphones, WiFi tele-phones, and a range of VoIP-based appli-cations, including voice mail and ACD.

Polycom Expands HD Video PortfolioPolycom (www.polycom.com) has an-nounced a new entry-level version of its Video Media Center (VMC) 1000 video content-management solution and en-hancements to the Polycom RSS 2000 communications recording and stream-

ing server. Polycom’s integrated solution allows organizations to use all Polycom video endpoints (and third-party H.323 video endpoints) to create high-quality video content, which can be streamed live or made available on demand through the VMC 1000’s customizable Web portal. Used in conjunction with the Polycom RSS 2000 recording and streaming server, customers can record point-to-point and multipoint videoconferences (including content shared within a call) and automat-ically store them centrally. Additionally, by using the VMC 1000 in concert with Polycom’s videoconferencing systems, a videoconference can be streamed to spe-cifi c, targeted individuals and groups, or streamed to broader audiences.

The new entry-level Polycom VMC 1000 supporting 250 concurrent streams is now available through Polycom certi-fi ed channels at a suggested list price in North America of $59,500. The RSS 2000 is currently shipping worldwide with a North America suggested retail price starting at $15,000. V

V I D E O

This Just Out


http://www.cbeyond.com

http://www.telecom.toshiba.com


http://www.gl.com



To Robert Indars, the daily grind is a good thing. That’s because his business will polish, grind, dice, lap, or opti-cally etch just about any material.

“We give engineers the tools to build whatever they want,” says Indars.

As the IT person for Shirley, Mass.-based Valley Design Corp. (www.valleydesign.com), Indars says his company shapes ru-dimentary parts from plastic to silicon, and from semiconduc-tors to glass. These can become the base materials of everything from a chipset in a cell phone CPU to an optical glass with a three-inch round polish for R&D engineers.

“Our company is extremely early in the process of building a product,” says Indars. “It basically goes from the raw materials to being shaped by us.”

Valley Design’s custom-order building blocks attract a cut-ting-edge clientele that includes the aerospace industry, high-tech fi rms, and research facilities like Sandia National Labs and Lawrence Livermore.

But while its clientele is 21st century, Valley Design’s legacy phones were decidedly stuck in the 1980s. The company was limping al-ong with an 18-year-old, key-based Nitsuko TIE Onyx system.

“It was dying and losing features,” says Indars.Calls were being randomly dropped; voice mail was gone a

long time ago. There was no call transfer to the Santa Cruz, Calif., sales offi ce, and no three-digit dialing. The offi ce recep-tionists were transferring outside calls from coast to coast and incurring long-distance charges in the process.

“Basically we were two companies trying to fake it as one,” says Indars.

Indars had used outside contractors to put Band-Aids on the system. But when call transfer died, Indars began hunting around for newer options.

Indars did almost a year of due diligence searching for the right partner, examining a half dozen different companies be-fore making his decision. His IT budget was small, but that didn’t deter the reps from some of the larger VoIP companies.

“I had a lot of nice meetings with guys in Brooks Brothers suits, trying to sell me systems that were absurdly expensive,” says Indars.

Indars eventually picked Traverse City, Michigan-based .e4 Technologies (www.e4strategies.com), based on its ability to offer low-cost, vendor-agnostic VoIP solutions. Indars worked directly with .e4 owner Michael White.

Indars heard from a corporate colleague that an Asterisk-

based system might be the way to go. Asterisk supports a wide range of TDM protocols for the handling and transmission of voice over traditional telephony interfaces, featuring VoIP packet protocols such as SIP and IAX.

Valley Design possessed a data network in fairly decent shape–a 2003 server and HP ProCurve switches. It was us-ing PRI solutions over analog lines to connect to the outside Internet at T1 speeds.

Based on lengthy conversations with Indars to meet Valley Design’s needs, White preconfi gured the equipment in his lab before shipping. A hands-on tech guy, Indars installed the box himself.

Using Digium’s Asterisk PBX software, White created a tele-phony environment that includes all the sophisticated features of a high-end business telephone system. The system is hybrid hosted, combining customer premise equipment with remote monitoring and hosting back at .e4’s main offi ce.

New features include direct inward dialing (DID), call queues, intelligent call routing, the ability for the administrator to do adds, transfers, and deletes, and the ability of anyone to park customers on hold.

“We even have on-hold music now,” jokes Indars.After testing out fi ve or six different phones on his desk,

shipped to him courtesy of White, Indars chose an Aastra Asterisk-supported VoIP phone. Cost was a factor, so the phone was a carrier-grade basic-level IP telephone.

“I like it. The handset has this sleek ‘Star Trek’ feel about it,” says Indars.

Indars was fully trained on the ins and outs of the new sys-tem via an .e4 webinar. He then trained the staff with a short presentation in Valley Design’s conference room.

As for return on investment, Indars says it’s hard to put a dollar amount on it.

“Mostly, it’s increased productivity. We can act as one com-pany now, which is the way it should be.”

Plans for the future include upgrading Valley Design’s offi ces and shop fl oors to wireless VoIP.

“In our shop we’re dealing with hundreds of square feet,” says Indars. “At the moment, with only a few phones, you have to hoof it to answer a page.”

It takes a lot of grit and friction to manufacture Valley Design’s industrial parts. And yet, thanks to .e4 Technologies, there’s no longer any friction in Indar’s phone system. V

Greg Tally can be reached at [email protected].

What Works At Work

Grinding Out a Phone Solution

by Greg Tally


http://www.valleydesign.com

http://www.e4strategies.com



Service Quality Matters™

© 2007 Brix Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. Brix Networks, Brix, Brixnet, Service Quality Matters, Brix Assured, and the Brix Networks logo are trademarks of Brix Networks, Inc. Brix Networks, Inc. • 285 Mill Road Chelmsford, MA USA 01824 • 978-367-5600 • 1-888-BRIXNET • www.brixnet.com • [email protected]

Converged Service Assurance Resource Center: Visit www.brixnet.com/csa to discover how you can roll out converged services with confidence.

Assure Any IP Service, Over Any Network, To Any Endpoint

You’re on the hook to roll out new IP services. Your users are calling for converged voice, video, and Internet offerings. And you’ve got your hands full trying to implement these next-generation services while struggling to providea quality user experience. Meanwhile, you also have legacy backoffice and network support systems to consider.

But guess what? Your users don’t care about your problems. All they care aboutis how well you deliver the services they want. And they want these servicesnow. They want to know their VoIP calls will always be clear, their IPTV serviceis DVD quality, and their data is moving reliably.

You need a converged service assurance solution that lets you roll out new IPservices with confidence. One that lets you verify the quality of your serviceoffering throughout its lifecycle — from pre-deployment, to ongoing operationalmonitoring, to customer care — via a unique combination of active (on-demand)testing and passive (live) monitoring of IP services and infrastructures.

In short, you need Brix Networks.

With Brix, you can deliver and assure quality IP services to your demandingusers. No matter the service. No matter the network. No matter the endpoint.

No sweat.

Never Let Them See You Sweat the Rollout of Your IP Services


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problems, attempt to tie up network resources or interfere with service protocols and processes so that the proper level of service is denied to subscribers. DoS attacks take several forms. One method is to force the operating system of a network element to fault, either disrupting service or presenting some other undesirable customer experience. Another method is to send false messages for the various protocols used in the service. These false messages can interfere with the correct operation of the service. The so-called “flood” or Distrib-uted Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are intended to overwhelm network resources. These attacks attempt to force the network element to divert resources such as CPU power or memory to handle false requests for service, leading to a degradation of service. Another denial of service attack can be due to excess traffic on the network, for example, from worms and viruses. Excess traffic can degrade network performance enough such that voice packets are delayed or even dropped, and possibly cause a degradation in voice quality.

Fraud and/or Theft of Service AttacksFraud and/or theft of service attacks are situations where individuals use more services or resources than they are entitled to use. Fraud can cover the spectrum from complete theft (where service is used without authorization by non-subscribers) to partial theft (where more service is used by a subscriber than permitted or paid for). Fraud may also occur if new, advanced features are not adequately protected.

Data Confidentiality and Privacy AttacksData privacy issues are concerned with protecting the rights of VoIP users by protecting their personal data. Subscriber data required for providing service may be stored within service provider databases. Typical IP attacks against privacy are directed toward compromising the network elements or databases that contain customer data. Information that VoIP users would consider private is also transported within the voice conversation and the signaling proto-col. Private data in the signaling protocol may include, for example, the phone numbers being called by a subscriber, when particular calls were placed and the duration of the calls. Unprotected voice and signaling transported over public or shared IP networks may be susceptible to confidentiality (eavesdropping) attacks.

The Network – A Frontline Security Device AT&T Wholesale (AT&T Wholesale and its affiliated companies are collectively referred to herein as AT&T) incorporates security as an integral part of its AVOICS (AT&T Voice over IP Connect Service)

Security – a Critical Component of VoIP ServiceSecurity is widely regarded by service providers as the single most important component affecting VoIP services on their network. End users reasonably expect their VoIP services to offer the same level of security and privacy as traditional PSTN communications. Unfortu-nately, new security challenges appear almost daily, thanks to the ever-increasing ingenuity and ruthlessness of attackers. Conven-tional measures to secure IP data networks are generally inadequate to protect voice traffic, which requires a specialized security approach. In addition to security measures to prevent denial of service attacks, viruses and malware (such as worms), voice traffic requires additional protection from fraud, theft of service and compromised confidentiality of communications, customer information and signaling.

A strong set of security policies and continuous risk assessment are critical to every VoIP service provider in order to protect their networks and internal systems and establish business continuity for services. Brian Riggs, Research Director for Enterprise at Current Analysis, observes that, “Software that detects unauthorized use of VoIP systems, prevents service disruption and eavesdropping, and monitors voice networks for new threats will be vital for businesses....” Best practices, including basics such as timely patch-ing of operating systems, changing software password defaults, segmenting networks so that data and voice traffic don't adversely affect each other, and prioritizing highly-sensitive voice traffic via

quality-of-service offerings can help businesses cut down significantly on threats to their VoIP

networks.

VoIP – A Summary of Security ThreatsDenial of Service Attacks

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, often due to software vulnerabilities or implementation

…DELIVERED

ATT Advertorial 2pg (VON).ai 2/8/08 3:14:51 PM


Commitment to Quality of Service for Wholesale CustomersAt AT&T, security is an integral element of all services. As in its switched network, AT&T’s IP/MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) security architecture employs state-of-the-art mechanisms designed to support the availability, integrity and confidentiality of its customers’ VoIP services while simultaneously maintaining quality of service. As a further safeguard, AT&T employs continuous monitoring of its global IP network to rapidly identify potential threats and respond with appropriate security measures. Wholesale customers can confidently offer VoIP services to their end users knowing that AT&T’s legacy of service quality, security and reliability are the foundation for their service offerings.

product which provides IP-based connectivity to AT&T's network for wholesale domestic and international VoIP call termination. AT&T has developed a security architecture that strengthens poten-tially vulnerable points; deploying security mechanisms throughout the network elements and service to provide seamless security against denial of service attacks and other fraudulent activities. This architecture is designed to safeguard privacy of customer communi-cations and protect personal information as well. (Details of AT&T’s warranties are contained in the contract documents.)

According to Ed Amoroso, AT&T’s Chief Security Officer, "As companies transition to VoIP services, it is essential that they work with their carrier to assess and mitigate security risk. In fact, AT&T’s network is a major component in the security model that customers are building for their businesses. What distinguishes AT&T is that defenses are built into the network. This allows customers to enjoy all the features of VoIP while minimizing the security concerns.”

To protect AT&T’s networks and services, AT&T uses a “defense-in-depth” security architecture, with security built into every network layer and every supporting process to prevent, isolate and resolve security vulnerabilities. The theory of “defense-in-depth” is that if the security fails at one layer, the next layer provides additional security with which to contend. "AT&T's unique approach to network-based security provides an additional layer of defense for companies and individuals," states Amoroso. “AT&T's protective mechanisms are integrated into the fabric of our network. This makes attacks more difficult."

The Best Defense? Proactive Analysis and Prevention“The best defense companies have is to formulate proactive plans, and implement advanced networking and security solutions. This strategy can assess risk and eradicate attacks that are brewing – long before they penetrate the network,” states Amoroso. “Instead of constantly reacting to threats and being defensive, companies have the advantage of being alerted to threats before they happen.”

AT&T takes a preventative approach to security by identifying, detecting and managing intrusions before they inflict damage. AT&T collects, analyzes and interprets data in real-time to enable rapid incident response. AT&T security experts in AT&T’s Global Network Operations Center (GNOC) monitor network security and performance around-the-clock. Traffic anomalies are detected and cyber-attacks are predicted in the early stages. This advance notice enables customers to take quick remedial action to contain and minimize damage inflicted by an attack.

You are on a highly sensitive call with your CFO regarding a pending acquisition. The last

thing you need is for your call to be hacked and the information leaked. Your call is made

from your office that has an IP desk phone using a VoIP network. You know your network

is secure but can you trust that your provider has taken the necessary steps to protect

your conversation?

AT&T VoIP Security Domains

CustomerPremisesDomain

AT&T VoIPBorderDomain

Common VoIP Connectivity Layer

Voice Applications

MGCPBorder

Elements

SIPBorder

Elements

H.323Border

Elements

VoIPNetworkElements

PSTN NetworkGateway

Border Elements

VoIPApplication

Servers

Customer Premises Layer

H.323Endpoints

MGCPEndpoints

AT&T VoIPInfrastructure

Domain

SIPEndpoints

AT&T’s VoIP security architecture is segmented into three security domains to prevent, isolate and resolve security vulnerabilities: the Customer Premises Domain, the AT&T Border Domain, and the AT&T VoIP Infrastructure Domain.

The Customer Premises Domain – Many of the security measures instituted by AT&T to secure VoIP must also be deployed by customers on their own devices to provide effective protection.

The AT&T Border Domain – AT&T separates traffic from the public Internet at the border to prevent DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks from ever entering our network. The VoIP border elements perform authentication and call admission; malformed and/or unexpected packets are discarded.

The AT&T VOIP Infrastructure Domain – AT&T’s IP/MPLS network provides state-of-the-art security and fraud protection. Wholesale VoIP traffic transverses a logically separated VPN with top QoS for traffic prioritization. To preserve network integrity, customer access is never permitted directly into this VPN; all customer access is mediated by the AT&T IP border elements.

1

2

3

ATT Advertorial 2pg (VON).ai 2/8/08 3:14:51 PM


VON®

Pioneers

Photography by Mark Till


MAR-APR08_FEATURES_REV3.indd 18MAR-APR08_FEATURES_REV3.indd 18 3/3/08 7:02:43 PM3/3/08 7:02:43 PM


Tom Pincince was born on December 1, 1963, in Pasadena, Calif. As a child, Pincince was ahead of the curve, taking high school algebra in the third grade. His higher education path proved to be a bit more unique. Pincince started out as a pre-med student at Brown University, but he didn’t pass organic chemistry, a requirement to move forward. While pondering his future, he built sets for an al-ternative theatre in Providence and enjoyed the work so much he considered transferring to the Rhode Island School of Design to major in architecture.

Instead, he remained at Brown and changed his major to neuroscience. His thesis project examined brain injury treatment and studied how a mouse’s whiskers transmit information to its brain. His work is still being used by his professor as a teaching and research aid.

He went on to MIT’s graduate program in brain and cognitive science, where he studied Alzheimer’s disease and other memory disorders. Although he found the work to be quite interesting, Pincince wasn’t sure if he wanted to end up as a college professor–but he was interested in the potential of his Macintosh.

Out of graduate school, Pincince talked his way into a job at voice technology pioneer Kurzweil Technologies, convincing the company he could write C despite having no experience in the language. He taught himself C at night, learning just enough fast enough to be able to port the company’s Sun-based optical character-reading software to the Mac.

Kurzweil, owned by Xerox, exposed him to the tensions between the entrepreneurial and corporate worlds. Pincince preferred the former to the later and left Kurzweil to take a series of jobs at Boston-area high-tech companies, gaining technical and managerial experience that helped him land a position at Forrester Research as an industry analyst in the mid-1990s. As director of Forrester Research’s Network Strategy Service, he focused on the commercial use of the Internet, and defi ned the market for corporate intranets and the possibilities of private data services over the public Internet.

VON®

Pioneers

Thomas Pincince FOUNDER, CEOBRIX NETWORKSEditor-in-Chief Doug Mohney interviews another of the extraor-dinary, far-sighted individuals whose efforts have made possible today’s IP communications industry.





VON®

PioneersTired of watching other people make money from his ideas, he

left Forrester to start New Oak Communications, a pioneering vendor of virtual private networking (VPN) switches that was acquired in 1998 by Bay Networks (now Nortel Networks), to create the Contivity Extranet Switch product family.

Leaving Nortel, he took some time off and started Brix Networks in July 1999. Today, Pincince is still at Brix, and the company is a growing and widely acknowledged global leader in providing solutions that allow carriers, service providers, cable companies, and large enterprises to guarantee the successful launch and on-going, profi table operation of various IP-based services, includ-ing voice (VoIP), video (IPTV, VoD), and data (Internet).

Pincince is a member of the Massachusetts Network Com-munications Council’s Board of Directors, the Museum of Science Boston’s Board of Directors, and he was selected as a fi nalist for Ernst & Young’s 2003 New England Entrepreneur of the Year Award. He is married and has a daughter and a son.

Mohney: I’ve always heard stories about people bluffi ng their way into jobs as programmers without any previous experi-ence, but you actually did it! And working in C at Kurzweil Technologies no less! How did you manage that feat?

Pincince: My undergraduate work in neuroscience at Brown University led me to MIT’s graduate program in brain and cog-nitive science, where I studied Alzheimer’s disease and other memory disorders. Although I found this work to be quite in-teresting, from a career perspective I could see that my studies would lead me down the path toward being a college professor, and I wasn’t quite sure if that was what I really wanted to do. That’s when I started to take a keener interest in the Macintosh computer I taught myself how to use as a research tool and also started dabbling in the Pascal programming language.

After completing graduate work at MIT, I interviewed with voice-technology pioneer Kurzweil Technologies. My soon-to-be bosses were somehow under the impression I could write C-code−I’m not really sure why [winks]. Even though I had zero experience in this area, I landed a job porting the compa-ny’s Sun-based optical character-reading software to a Mac. But I taught myself C-code at night and learned just enough, fast enough, to get the job done.

Kurzweil, which was owned by Xerox, turned out to be an education for me in more than C-code–it was also my fi rst ex-posure to the natural tension that exists between the entrepre-neurial and the corporate worlds. And it convinced me that I was much better suited for an entrepreneurial-type work exis-tence versus being part of a hulking corporate entity.

Mohney: What was your thinking in jumping from an analyst at Forrester Research to starting up New Oak Communications? Would you go back?

Pincince: As an analyst, I learned to constantly think ahead and focus on the “micro”–things you can change–and be aware that you can’t change the “macro,” which is to say a whole mar-ket or industry, at once. At Forrester, I researched and wrote re-ports on networking and the Internet in the mid-’90s when the World Wide Web was still very much in its infancy and prior to its widespread adoption and use as the indispensable daily tool it has become for all of us.

After seeing several of my reports incorporated into business plans for successful start-up companies, I decided to satisfy my own strong entrepreneurial leanings and started New Oak Communications, one of the fi rst companies to develop VPN switching technology that allows the public Internet to behave like a private network.

Bay Networks purchased New Oak in 1998, and then Nortel Networks subsequently acquired Bay a few months later. I re-mained at Nortel for a while, and then decided to take some time off.

As much as I enjoyed my time as an analyst, for me there’s re-ally nothing like the challenge, rush, and satisfaction of starting and building a company, leading a strong, talented team, and delivering solutions to customers that solve their problems.

Mohney: Thinking about the start-up space in 2008–where would you want to start up a high-tech company today, Boston or Silicon Valley? Do you think the reputation of Silicon Valley is overstated when you look at Boston or other high-tech areas?

Pincince: I see that decades-old “Silicon Valley or Route 128”

I learned to constantly think ahead and focus on the “micro”–things you can change–and be aware that you can’t change the “macro”...a whole market or industry, at once.




VON®

Pioneers

debate is still raging, huh [laughs]? Look, there are a lot of places today that are great for starting a new entity, even be-yond the traditional East Coast-West Coast high-tech hubs of the United States. What was true 10, 20, or 30 years ago is still very true today: wherever you have a concentration of higher education, great ideas, willing investors, a highly capable work force, and a supportive infrastructure−which these days means the Valley, 128, and beyond−very interesting companies can al-ways emerge. But, to answer your question, since my home is in the greater Boston area, I would start a company here, as I did with New Oak in 1996 and Brix in 1999.

Mohney: There are a lot of companies in the market and a lot of niches when it comes to testing and monitoring. What makes Brix Networks unique?

Pincince: From the outset, Brix has bet on IP becoming the convergence driver for the networking industry when it comes to next-gen voice, video, and data services. This has proven to be correct. Further, we focus on providing solutions that ad-dress the operational phase of the IP service deployment lifecy-cle because we feel that is where Tier 1 carriers, service provid-ers, cable companies, and large enterprises are most exposed. When our customers bet on IP, they know that they need to meet−or exceed−existing levels of quality and end-user expec-tations, in a highly competitive marketplace.

The advantage we provide our customers is the ability to as-

sure any IP service, over any network, to any endpoint−all from the same extensible platform.

Whether it’s for a worldwide, multi-service MPLS network, backbone transport for long-distance wireless or wireline VoIP traffi c, an IPTV distribution network, residential VoIP services, or a managed IP telephony offering for enterprise customers, our products are unique in their ability to collect and measure the key performance indicators that truly refl ect the end-to-end performance and quality of an IP-based service.

Mohney: What matters more today, monitoring network per-formance or service quality? And why?

Pincince: In an election year, I’d prefer not to have to respond with an evasive-sounding, politician-like “it depends” reply, but it actually does. In Europe, for instance, a large operator who has clearly bet heavily on NGN told us recently that they pay primary attention to service quality as an indicator of underly-ing network availability, not the other way around. Then there

From the outset, Brix has bet on IP becoming the convergence driver for the networking industry when it comes to next-gen voice, video, and data services. This has proven to be correct.




VON®

Pioneersare other customers who instead focus on getting the network right before they roll out their next-gen services from that foun-dation. The beauty of our Brix System is we provide the fl exible tools to address both of these priorities and approaches.

Mohney: Carriers are talking a lot about speed these days. ARRIS and Cisco both have announced DOCSIS 3.0 cable mo-dems that will exceed speeds of 100 Mbps. Verizon has an-nounced it’s moving to a GPON backbone for FIOS. Wireless carriers are promising speeds of over 100 Mbps through LTE. All of these devices are going to drive higher core-network speeds. Several carriers are already moving from 10 Gbps to 40 Gbps on the backbone and have tested 100 Gbps. How do you keep pace from a monitoring perspective?

Pincince: We’re very fortunate insofar as many of the world’s major carriers are our customers, and we constantly listen to what they’re saying. As a result, we’ve always had a great front-row seat with regard to spotting trends early and then getting out in front of them with our product-development efforts. For example, our latest in-network appliance, the Brix 4100 Verifi er family, handles multi-Gigabit speeds and was created specifi -cally to address this very issue.

This product line was designed for use in large-scale produc-tion networks, provides real-time monitoring of live customer VoIP and IPTV traffi c, and equips network operators with de-tailed, end-to-end service monitoring capabilities that ensure voice and video service quality with full visibility across trans-port, signaling, and media performance, which allows essen-tial operations and customer-care issues to be proactively ad-dressed.

The 4100 family scales beyond full Gigabit capacity for voice and video streams and helps network operators transition their services from closed TDM networks to open IP/MPLS-based in-frastructures by providing immediate visibility across signaling and media.

Mohney: Now you have a much faster backbone network and you need to fi gure out what’s going on at the edge. Complicating matters is the consumer, who has run down to Best Buy and bought the special of the week, be it a stock router, femtocell, a DVR, whatever, and dropped it on his broadband connection. But when things go wrong, the service provider gets the call. How do you provide visibility into third-party endpoints? Do faster endpoints and video–HD or otherwise–on the home net-work add still more challenges?

Pincince: They do, and what you begin to see is the carrier beginning to lose control of its own network. The old black phone was just an extension of the closed PSTN, but now the operator essentially provides a standard interface and the con-sumer, as you point out, can decide independently which de-vices to connect to that standard interface.

By leveraging products that support industry standards, or include embedded software agents, our solutions are able to harvest intelligence from these network elements and endpoint devices to gain a comprehensive performance and quality view of revenue-generating services and the networks they rely on. By performing on-demand or active testing and live or passive service-assurance monitoring to enterprise or residential cus-

tomer premise equipment, the Brix System enables providers to guarantee that SLAs and QoE [quality of experience] expecta-tions are continually met for all converged service offerings.

Mohney: Hypothetically speaking, if Brix was going shop-ping, what sort of companies and/or areas of interest might it be looking at?

Pincince: Well, “hypothetically speaking,” we would only be interested in complementary technology and/or products that will enable us to grow our top line organically, such as adjacent areas like deep packet inspection or session border controller functions.

Mohney: Given your eclectic background, Brix has focused your attention for quite a signifi cant amount of time. What do you love about your company and your job?

Pincince: That’s easy. I enjoy coming to work every day and helping our customers and partners solve their problems. I am also very proud of the team we’ve been able to attract and re-tain, and that we’ve been able to offer them meaningful, inter-esting work. Many of our employees have been with us for at least fi ve years and quite a few have been here for seven, eight, and nine years. It’s a very dedicated and good group, and we all work well together.

Mohney: What do you do for fun? Pincince: I am active in youth sports with my children, enjoy

vacations down on Nantucket, and this being Boston, I’m an avid follower of the Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, and Revolution−that’s the soccer team. V




Delivering a single point of contact (number), re-gardless of the number of phones you may have–desktop, mobile, home–is one of the cornerstones of fi xed-mobile convergence (FMC). But is it a perfect solution? How many phones do you really need?• The progress we’ve seen in FMC solutions has been fueled by a combination of factors. The widespread adoption of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for VoIP deployment has de-livered more than simply VoIP calling. SIP routing has given service providers a tool to eliminate the barriers between tra-ditional telephony networks and IP-based service networks.• Handset design is dynamic and constant. The rising proces-sor power and functionality of multi-band handsets provides constant new ideas and techniques to integrate services. Integrating WiFi into handsets yields great potential but re-mains fraught with challenges.• Business needs are evolving more quickly than ever. Competing initiatives shift constantly to embrace and in-corporate other methods. The rapid evolution to a commu-nications-enhanced business process (CEBP) integration of network services with enterprise business applications is a prime driver of change.

The struggle to fi nd the right fi t is in balancing many fac-tors. Do we need one phone with many numbers? Or do we need one number on many phones? The answer sometimes seems to be both, but that can simply be a nuance used by a particular solution provider to solve one aspect of the larger issue from their vantage point.

These are, in part, infl uencers of the business drivers. Certainly cost is a business driver for FMC. The idea of mov-ing a call off the more expensive cellular network to the cor-porate or home wireless LAN (WLAN) is important as a cost reduction, not as a technology feature. But this convergence of network services, from what have been distinctly separate networks, also presents an integration of applications and services in a new light. Whether we call it convergence, soft-

ware-oriented architecture, or software as a service doesn’t matter. The collision between network services and business applications is driven by changing business needs.

As the cost of integrated circuits drops and CPU capabil-ity gets more effi cient, devices shrink and get more effi cient. Mobile technology that was once expensive and uncommon is now in the hands of nearly everyone. The rise of wireless broadband technologies coupled with advances in device de-sign has brought us to the point where, for many profession-als, a Blackberry or smartphone device connected via high-speed technologies has become not just a business tool but the primary workstation. Today, mobile computing solutions provide a fundamental business tool that many organizations simply can’t function without. This shift toward mobile, ubiquitous access further fuels the advance to FMC.

In the past 10 years, we’ve seen convergence taking place on many different levels. Circuit convergence was driven by cost reduction. Workforce and internal services staff integration soon followed. Desktops have converged to smaller, lighter devices, now including FMC-enabled mobile phones.

Frank Paterno, Vice President of Marketing at Intelliverse (www.intelliverse.com), equates some of the business needs we’re seeing today as a natural evolution. “Some of the nu-ances of unifi ed communications are a re-emergence of the fi nd-me/follow-me approaches we were using ten years ago,” Paterno says. “Local number portability (LNP) is a huge dif-ference since the last cycle of unifi ed messaging efforts. The practical viability of being able to easily port numbers makes the convergence of these solutions a practical approach.”

Paterno describes the past approach to getting many num-bers onto a single phone. Like GrandCentral (www.grandcen tral.com), Intelliverse offers a solution that’s based on the fi nd-me/follow-me concepts of earlier generations. In the past, us-ers had to obtain a new special phone number, then forward all of their calls to the new number and allow that number

FMC: One Number, Many Phones?

by Ken Camp



http://www.intelliverse.com

http://www.grandcentral.com

http://www.grandcentral.com

http://www.vonmag.com

to follow. The benefi t of converging single numbers to a new phone number is that voice mail becomes unifi ed messaging and the caller experience is unique. This variation on soft-ware-defi ned networking allows users to set programming for how calls are processed based on caller ID, time of day, ad-dress book, and a suite of customer-programmable criteria.

What FMC gives a business in terms of redefi ning how calls are handled is starting to become clear for many. In the real estate business, for example, agents in the fi eld interact with clients constantly. One of the biggest problems a real estate broker faces is a sales agent leaving the fi rm and taking clients along to a new fi rm. The cell phone number becomes the customer’s link.

With LNP, moving a phone number from one cell phone to another is simple today. Intelliverse’s managed VoIP and FMC solutions provide a way for the broker to own the tele-phone numbers associated with mobile phones. Numbers can be assigned to agents. When an agent leaves the broker-age, the number can easily be reassigned to another agent or the broker. The continuity of the customer relationship is maintained without the loss of the client. It’s an approach to FMC that helps companies maintain their identity and pres-ence in customer’s minds.

Across the industry, the same themes echo time and again. David Hattey, President and CEO of FirstHand Technologies (www.fi rsthandtech.com) explains. “One of today’s issues with mobility is there are multiple phone numbers on a sales person’s business card. Which one should the customer phone fi rst?” In describing his company’s solution, he says that when only one phone number is published on a business card, multiple devices ring, including the salesperson’s mo-bile device. This ensures customers reach sales people much more quickly, no matter where the salesperson is.

“This is a defi nite advantage for the enterprise when it comes to salespeople who hand out their personal cell phone number to customers,” Hattey says. “But when a salesper-son leaves to go to another company, the salesperson takes his customers with him as he will continue to call the sales-person on his personal cell number. With our solution, the enterprise simply assigns the ex-salesperson’s mobile exten-sion to the new salesperson, who will continue working with existing customers.”

In fi gure 1, we see the telephone communications world of today, albeit greatly simplifi ed. Generally, we fall into three different situations–we are at work, at home, or somewhere in between with mobile access to the network. One challenge with FMC is enabling people to communicate using one de-vice with one number at home, in the offi ce, and on the go. Another is enabling people to communicate with any device of choice based on what’s available at the time. The phone on a business person’s desk at the offi ce may need the same services as a personal computer at home or a Blackberry while mobile.

Luc Roy, VP of Product Planning for Siemens Enterprise Communications (www.enterprise-communications.siemens.

com) speaks with ease about a slightly different view. Siemens uses the phrase fi xed-mobile convenience. “Users can reduce their number of devices and instead use a single device for all of their communications needs no matter where they are or what they are doing,” Roy says. “This can result in signifi cant productivity benefi ts since workers no longer require multiple specialized devices or need to manage multiple contact lists or voice mailboxes. Instead everything is accessible from a single device using a consistent user interface.”

Siemens’ solution is another response to a range of cor-porate challenges. Mobility is clearly on the rise. Forrester Research reports have indicated that roughly 40 percent of workers in the United States perform their work in mobile or remote mode 20 percent or more each day.

Mobile phones and other wireless devices leverage WLANs, but these still can’t deliver the range and performance levels required to approach the ubiquity of the mobile carrier net-works.

As Roy explains Siemens’ viewpoint, there are issues be-yond simply cost, security, and administration for enterprises to address. Workers have many options for communication–legacy mail, fax, voice calls (either fi xed or mobile), e-mail, voice/videoconferencing, and instant messaging (IM). All are widely used in business. The problem is that this diversity of communications may actually distract from workers’ respon-siveness as they’re inundated with a river of daily information bombarding their senses from numerous sources. The act of managing all the incoming information can distract from the core work tasks, degrading productivity and effectiveness and undermining the value of the communications network.Michael Remacle, Senior Director of Offer Management in the Wholesale Communications group at Level 3 (www.level3.com) brings a completely alternate view to the ques-tion of one number for many phones. As a wholesale carrier, Level 3 provides voice-oriented segments–VoIP call origina-tion and termination–for FMC services. Remacle cites the rising benefi t businesses are fi nding with the rapidly emerg-ing set of dedicated FMC providers. “Aggregators like Ring


Figure 1


http://www.firsthandtech.com


http://www.enterprise-communications.siemens.com

http://www.level3.com

http://www.level3.com

http://www.enterprise-communications.siemens.com

Central or GrandCentral are variations on the theme of fi nd-me/follow-me,” he says. “The problem lies in the call back number. Caller ID for returned calls doesn’t match up with expectations, creating a disjointed user experience.”

He cites the ability to route direct inward dial (DID) calls to SIP as a powerful enabler that lets FMC resellers become the call control owner, layering added services on top, echo-ing the Intelliverse solution.

Remacle also notes the viability of temporary disposable numbers, like the ones Jangl (www.jangl.com) promotes. While a viable technology solution, this approach is less a business convergence tool and more a consumer convenience tool. An individual selling an item on eBay, for example, might want a phone number directed to his or her cell phone that works only for the life of the auction.

Primary line services for residence and for business require advanced communications solutions. According to Remacle, this ability to route calls intelligently to a single phone is the enhanced service that’s fundamental to unifi ed communica-tions. He says the path to success for solution providers is to “use the advanced services capabilities of the network to completely change how people communicate.

SummaryThe idea of multiple phone numbers remains key to our suc-cess. In the broad view, a telephone number is associated with

a person, but also with a role that person plays–a persona. The business woman has a different set of needs than the mother caring for children. Call handling needs to route to a single device for consistency at the recipient end of the call. Anyone who has routinely carried two cell phones, a pager, and laptop computer will confi rm that reducing the number of devices a person carries is a huge value.

Conversely, routing calls to a single device ensures a con-sistent experience to the caller. Someone who reaches our voice mail at work gets handled in a similar manner when they call home. This is tied to role-based call handling. We can, through software defi nition in the network, defi ne how callers are treated based on their role.

When we look to the evolution of CEBP and how mo-bile technology integrates more tightly with each iteration, it’s clear that a fi rst step in the cycle is the ability to use one number for consolidation and call consistency. Another cycle evolving in parallel is unrestricted ability for users to map that device to any device available, whether it is a traditional phone, VoIP phone, mobile device, computer, or perhaps even an automobile. V

Ken Camp has 30 years of experience in unifi ed communica-tions, network performance improvement, security practices, and the design and deployment of integrated voice and data so-lutions. He can be reached at [email protected].


http://www.jangl.com



http://www.elmabustronic.com


Pipes play a key part in any aquarium. They are used for fi ltering, water supply, and salinity. Along similar lines, the world’s largest aquarium needed data pipes for crucial confer-encing, collaboration, video, and other converged services.

The Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, Ga., (www.georgiaaquar ium.org) opened with great fanfare in 2005. The not-for-profi t tourist attraction utilizes over eight million gallons of water and features a large collection of aquatic animals. Its mission bal-ances the triple imperatives of entertainment, education, and scientifi c research. This includes a veterinary teaching hospi-tal connected via live conferencing to the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech).

Before its opening, the aquarium’s IT department recognized the importance of dedicated, burstable high bandwidth for its converged needs.

“We do a lot of high-defi nition photos and video content on our Web site,” says Beach Clark, Vice President of Information Technology for the aquarium. (The overused jokes tire him, but yes, he works in an aquarium, his fi rst name is Beach, and yes, he is a Pisces). “This includes three live-video Web cams,” he says, adding that he and his fi ve-person team as well as volun-teers also post fi sh videos to YouTube.

Clark had previously worked for Home Depot for 12 years and was familiar with New York-based dark fi ber and colloca-tion company telx (www.telx.com).

Besides Atlanta, telx has facilities in Charlotte, N.C.; Chicago, Ill.; Dallas, Tex.; Miami, Fla.; New York, N.Y.; Phoenix, Ariz.; Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Santa Clara, Calif.; and Weehawken, N.J.

“Over 12 years, I had gotten to know the people at Georgia Tech,” says Beach. “And I knew they had gotten fi ber left over from the Olympic Games. We got to talking about ways to con-nect them to the aquarium. I knew they had used telx as well.”

Location also played a role in the decision. Telx’s carrier hotel at 56 Marietta Street is located only a half mile from the aquari-um, also a short two hops away from the Internet.

“We wanted the ability to have a hosted Web site with a hub-based bandwidth connection,” says Beach.

Beach says this includes 2 Gbps of dedicated fi ber so the in-stitution can prepare for future needs. The Aquarium colocates its core interconnection equipment with telx, which manages the cross connects.

Currently there are periods where the Web site is heavily ac-cessed. The aquarium uses 10 to 20 Mbps, burstable to 100

Mbps. The burstable needs arise from a curious public eager to watch streaming video.

“For instance, when our whale sharks were delivered from Taiw-an, we used the maximum high-speed bandwidth,” says Beach.

Collaboration plays an integral part as well. The network build enables interconnections to Southern Light Rail, a re-search network aggregator providing access to the Internet 2 network, as well as the National Lambda Rail and the Southern Crossroads, a research network peering service.

“By building our own dark fi ber network into telx, we save money on various local loops that would otherwise be neces-sary to gain access to these invaluable research networks,” says Beach.

To handle the volume of data, the aquarium uses industry-standard load balancers. They also utilize name-brand fi rewalls and networking OS; a cautious Beach does not want brand names released for fear of hackers.

AT&T provides redundant connectivity in case of failover. While Bell South provides the aquarium’s VoIP over a metro Ethernet connection, Beach says the aquarium engages in a lot of high-defi nition, low-latency videoconferencing via telx fi ber. It uses experimental open-source videoconferencing.

“We actually have veterinary interns connected through con-ferencing to the aquarium from their university,” says Beach. “We experimented with working with vets in our labs to spare the students a 60-minute drive all the way from Athens, Ga.”

Beach says it took only a couple of days for telx to light the fi ber.“We went live in incremental steps. In stages telx started bring-

ing online nonessential kinds of functionality,” says Beach.Telx did not provide any testing to the aquarium. No training

was necessary. The fi nal install of fi ber took place during the fi rst part of 2006.

“As a nonprofi t, there is no measurable return on invest-ment,” says Beach. “But the streaming video library we are building better positions us in the entertainment business.”

Moving forward over the next fi ve years, Beach envisions the aquarium delivering content similar to larger companies such as Disney or the Discovery Channel.

“We certainly offer low-latency, high-defi nition digital vid-eo,” says Beach. “This is something that puts us in a different category than other aquariums and smaller amusement parks in 2008.” V


What Works At Work

Telx Lights the Life Aquatic

by Greg Tally


http://www.telx.com



http://www.georgiaaquarium.org

http://www.georgiaaquarium.org


http://www.belgacom-ics.com


Think of it as the David and Goliath story, only per-formed in slow motion.

Christer Mattson knows fi rsthand the challenges of bidding out for new services with an old-school telephone company. As CEO of a small software fi rm with about 30 employees, Mattson understands the unhurried, deliberative processes a carrier moves through before selecting a system.

Mattson has also been on the receiving end of multinational rivals with big resources trying to knock down him and his company, King of Prussia, Penn.-based Codima Technologies (www.codimatech.com), removing them from competition for that extremely lucrative carrier business.

“I can easily say that it’s a tough, bruising process,” says Mattson. “Our rivals the whole time were saying, ‘Why go with a small company?’”

Mattson evidently must be a glutton for punishment. When Dublin-based British Telecom Ireland approached Codima, the company was simultaneously negotiating with Avaya, Erickson, and Fujitsu. The BT Ireland team had spoken with another part of the British Telecom holding company, BT United Kingdom. BT UK had already deployed Codima’s network diagnostic tools and was pleased with the results.

Looming over the entire telecom industry was Cisco System’s insistence that every network box have a traceable serial num-ber entry.

“It was a fairly severe requirement to have no grey boxes on the network. It meant visiting every customer,” says Tomás West, implementation and support manager for BT Ireland (http://home.btireland.ie/echannel/corp.portal). West’s division handles VoIP and network convergence issues for Ireland, with BT also covering large parts of Europe and Asia.

BT Ireland did utilize a mixed product suite of network diagnostic tools, but West says the programs were not stan-dardized and did not match the breadth and depth of Codima’s product line.

Codima’s software toolbox helps with VoIP management and actually maps out the network with Microsoft Offi ce Visio. Here’s the cool part: Codima’s autoMap network visualization tool automatically draws the entire network, from operating systems to server ports to any device across an IP network right up to the customer premise copper. This is not a static map, laboriously drawn by engineers. It is a real-time snapshot for monitoring and diagnostics.

“This provides a great deal in one shot. It is most useful as

a discovery-process snapshot tool,” says West. “This gives us a very base standard reporting model to capture a customer’s inventory.”

He describes the tool as reliable and able to overcome standard network mapping challenges such as fi rewalls and WAN links.

Most of the meticulous vetting occurred on the BT UK side of the business. When BT UK’s think tank began bidding out its diagnostic tool, it had three basic requirements: scalability, the ability to handle convergence, and a reliable consulting tool. BT UK approached several of the biggest names in the industry and began a two-year discovery process in 2005.

“It was about as tough as you might think,” says Mattson, describing the typical challenges of any large organization. “Rigorous testing in labs, visits to customer’s sites, dealing with different offi ces, people being fi red, key people being changed, you name it.”

Roughly 10 people from Codima participated in the devel-opment plan, with a changing set of roughly fi ve people from the BT group. After giving Codima the green light, BT Ireland bought its fi rst license in March 2007. Deploying the product was seamless, not disrupting the network.

“BT Ireland right away told us the product was appropriate to their needs,” says Mattson. “They told us the specifi c norms, went into our lab, and told us what they wanted.”

Mattson describes the Codima toolbox as both highly granu-lar in its network mapping, able to capture small details, as well as scale up to one million users.

There was a two-day training seminar for six BT Ireland employees, all them Cisco-certifi ed network professionals, fol-lowed by supplemental Web training and webinars.

For his part, West says BT Ireland will be able to charge con-sulting fees to its client base as a revenue stream and sell the diagnostic and mapping tools as a value-added service. BT has gained back a day from its typical on-property customer visits, with junior engineers troubleshooting and providing automat-ed information for planning, auditing, and legal requirements.

“We’re able to make better recommendations to our custom-ers as well as remove a great deal of grunt work for our en-gineers,” says West. “This complements the other tools we’re using on our networks.”

As for return on investment, West estimates BT will be able to recoup its investment within 12 months of deployment. V


What Works At Work

Codima Mapping BT Ireland’s Network in Real Time

by Greg Tally


http://www.codimatech.com

http://home.btireland.ie/echannel/corp.portal




Intern

ation

al Focu

sby Bob Emmerson

Euro Innovation

Mobile TV: A Classical Battle Is Brewing In the red corner we have DVB-H–a standard that the EU is pushing, but several countries oppose the move, and it will be a few years before mobile video really takes off. In the blue cor-ner we have IPTV delivered over high-speed wireless networks; i.e., WLAN and WiMAX, followed by LTE, which runs at wireline speeds. Open the envelope…and the winner is...

We’ll know in a few years, but we’ve been here before. It’s the classic “stan-dards versus market forces” battle. Europe needs standards because it isn’t a real common market. Right now there are 27 countries in the European Union (EU), which means that there are 27 dif-ferent political agendas, so consensus is hard to achieve.

The EU Commission wants to estab-lish Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld (DVB-H) as the single EU standard for mobile TV broadcasting by the end of February 2008. However, while there is no problem with the standard, several EU states are opposed to plans for rapid, nationwide rollouts.

There’s no problem because DVB-H is the mobile version of the established DVB-T standard for digital terrestrial television. It allows simultaneous trans-mission of multi-channel television, ra-dio, video, audio, and IP data to a range of multimedia receivers including cellu-lar phones, PDAs, PCs, and other hand-helds. And it builds on existing DVB-T infrastructure.

Advanced video coding and band-width-effi cient compression technolo-gies are employed in order to optimize small-screen quality, but there is a busi-ness issue. Fewer frames are transmitted, which means that so-called “gap fi llers” are needed. Operators therefore need to make investments, and in Europe, unlike Japan and Asia-Pacifi c, the market is at a

very early stage, hence the reluctance to sign up for nationwide rollouts.

Making the Digital SwitchEurope is switching to terrestrial digital broadcasting, and consumers are already obtaining and appreciating the benefi ts of digital TV. Mobile TV is therefore an evolutionary step for end users, and it makes obvious sense for content distrib-utors like TV and cable companies; i.e., it will generate new revenue streams.

Network upgrades are needed, and the mobile devices need to incorporate a TV tuner. Tuners are part of the front-end reference; chips have been developed and devices are shipping in Japan and Taiwan. And by the time you read this article, Nokia will have demonstrated broadcast-quality TV on the N77, and other mod-els will follow. So it’s only a question of time before broadcast-quality TV comes to European cell phones.

The Unicast Blue CornerMobile devices can access Internet con-tent over cellular networks, and this scenario doesn’t need a TV tuner. The new cell phones have enough process-ing power to handle real-time video, but right now wide-area networks are too slow. Mobile TV needs WiMAX and long-term evolution (LTE) data rates.

End-user data rates for Mobile WiMAX will probably vary between two and 12 Mbps. LTE is a newer technology that is in fi eld trials, and rates here should be three to four times higher. The theoreti-cal single-user rate for WiMAX is around 50 Mbps and 170 Mbps for LTE. The former services look set to roll out in a 2009-2010 time frame–the latter will come a couple of years later. So once again, it’s only a question of time before we get high-quality, unicast video con-tent delivered to the same devices.

Broadcast and Unicast ConvergeStatistically multiplexing enables a high-er number of channels to be employed over DVB-H, and this can be used to en-able a mix of mobile TV and personalized unicast channels. The former would be heavily used; the latter would be a “long tail.” Both types of content would be de-livered to the same mobile device.

This scenario is based on cooperation between broadcast and mobile network operators. And the media and frequency licensing process and timeline will vary from country to country. But the prog-nosis is healthy. Gartner predicts close to half a billion mobile TV subscribers by 2010. The Yankee Group estimates that the combined mobile TV and video mar-ket will hit €11 billion (US$16 billion) by the same date.

Effi cient DVB-H spectrum usage also allows information and radio services to be incorporated. This allows operators to offer rich, interactive multimedia servic-es to individuals and communities; e.g., chatting while listening to a performance or watching TV.

Learn the Lesson DVB-H may not be the best way of de-livering mobile TV, but it is in the pole position. The EU backs it and may end up making it a mandatory standard sometime this year. That would: (a) stifl e the debate about the respective merits of competing technologies such as DMB-T, DAB-IP, and MediaFLO; and (b) kick-start the market. The days when the tele-communications standards bodies could take several years to achieve consensus are over. V

Bob Emmerson, our European Editor, co-authored with Jeff Pulver the book, Run Your Organization in Real Time. He can be reached at [email protected].




Carriers knew that VoIP would end up threatening their business model, but in the early days the threat could be dismissed because the quality of calls made over the Internet was poor. However, IP PBXs were being developed and im-plemented, and it was clear that a model based on packetized voice over a managed IP network would prevail.

Their initial response was to develop an IP packetized net-work that overlaid the circuit-switched infrastructure. The idea was that the overlay network could evolve over time and pro-gressively replace sections of the PSTN. It made sense in terms of CAPEX, but ignored the fact that VoIP revenues would be very low, so the return on investment would be minimal.

With the benefi t of 20:20 hindsight it’s clear that carri-ers needed to create a best-of-both-worlds infrastructure. Combine the effi ciency and fl exibility of IP and other Internet technologies with telecom performance parameters such as call quality, security, and availability. In other words, do a complete makeover, and that is what British Telecom (BT, www.bt.com) announced to a somewhat startled marketplace back in June 2004.

BT’s Gargantuan ProgramThe marketplace was startled because it was as if a lethargic giant had woken up and leapt into twenty-fi rst-century ac-tion. At the time there were a lot of doubters. In late 2006, Paul Reynolds, then BT Wholesale’s CEO described it as “the most signifi cant, the most complex, and the widest ranging transformation program under way anywhere in our indus-try, worldwide.” In 2002, BT’s twenty-fi rst-century network program would have looked like an impossible dream.

The program required massive investments, but the com-pany expects it to produce OPEX savings of £1 billion (US$2 billion) per year. However, the key driver is use of the next-generation networking (NGN) as an operational rationale for transforming core business processes, which in turn has al-lowed the carrier to reinvent itself.

The program is on track. It’s scheduled for completion in

2012, and several key milestones have been reached. For ex-ample, in 2007, 35 percent of the UK core network had been built, and one trial carried 193 million calls over an IP link. In addition, BT has demonstrated that it can convert 150,000 customer links in a week.

The reinvention process has also resulted in the develop-ment of a global network, a portfolio of communications and collaboration services, and the 21C Global Venture (21C GV). The latter offers consulting, audit, design, and build as well as operation and maintenance services to Tier 2/3 op-erators and service providers. In a nutshell, this operation is selling the experience and know-how gained when designing and deploying 21CN.

MNOs Moved at a Later DateThe threat to mobile network operators (MNOs) came later. Subscribers were prepared to pay the mobility-roaming pre-mium, and wireless VoIP is in its infancy although the in-fant is growing fast. However, there was a compelling need to transition the network core to IP, and it can be encapsulated in one word: OPEX.

Circuit-switched cores used to handle over 90 percent of the revenue-generating traffi c in a typical mobile network. However, Ericsson (www.ericsson.com) cites case studies that show how softswitch technology can reduce network core OPEX by up to 80 percent.

In a traditional network, the mobile switching center (MSC) handles both control and switching. In Ericsson’s mo-bile switching solution, the MSC does control and a media gateway does the switching. This approach enables a more fl exible network design, and it also allows softswitch plat-forms to evolve toward generic server architectures that use commercial off-the-shelf processors and open-source operat-ing systems.

Nokia Siemens Networks (www.nsn.com) markets a solu-tion that also allows the separation of control and user planes into MSC server and media gateway functions, and the OPEX

ALL-IP CARRIER NETWORKS

Transitioning the biggestmachine in the world is a huge task.The PSTN ruled the communications world throughout the 20th century. Then the Internet came along. Carriers were challenged for the fi rst time. One gigantic tectonic plate hit another, and the reverberations haven’t stopped. by Bob Emmerson



http://www.bt.com

http://www.ericsson.com

http://www.nsn.com


reduction claim is similar. However, in this case the architec-ture allows the multiple TDM point-to-point connections of MSC networks to be replaced with Ethernet interfaces to the IP backbone.

Multicore Chip TechnologyBoth solutions are good examples of the way that transition-ing to IP is enabling the industry to design and implement network makeovers. Multicore technology comes into the picture because these chips have several “cores,” each of which is a processor that can perform an independent task. This allows what used to be a rack of separate products to be replaced by a single blade.

Gateways, for example, have become multifunctional prod-ucts; e.g., they do protocol conversion (TDM to IP and vice versa) as well as codex translation, and they are employed in peer-to-peer network scenarios that are protected by fi rewalls and need to accommodate private IP addresses. This develop-ment therefore enables a simpler network architecture and in turn allows staffi ng requirements to be reduced.

Switching in the Southern HemisphereNew Zealand’s former incumbent is now known as Telecom (www.telecom.co.nz) and like BT, it was one of the fi rst carri-ers to realize that operational separation was needed in order to realize the opportunities of NGN. For example, at the end of 2007, Telecom Wholesale announced a joint project with WorldxCommunications (www.worldxchange.com) to deliv-er phone and broadband services over fi ber direct to consum-ers in their homes.

As part of Telecom’s commitment to building a next-gen-eration access network, over the next four years about 3,600 new cabinets will be installed across the country, and they will be connected by 2,500 kilometers (over 1,500 miles) of fi ber-optic cable. And by the end of 2012, fast broadband will reach every town and city that has more than 500 telephone lines. V

Bob Emmerson, our European Editor, co-authored with Jeff Pulver the book, Run Your Organization in Real Time. He can be reached at [email protected].


MULTIMEDIA TELEPHONY FOR IMSWhichever way you look at IMS, and there are several ways, it is clear that this platform plays a pivotal role in the way that carrier networks transition to IP. One way is to give operators the tools with which to build a converged fi xed and mobile VoIP service offering with multimedia support. And that objective is facilitated by an ETSI/3GPP initiative known as the multimedia telephony communication service.

Multimedia telephony combines the quality, interoperability, reliability, effi ciency, and regulatory and supplementary services of traditional telephony with the rich, fl exible media capabilities of Internet community-based services. And because the service is built on IMS, it is access agnostic–that is, it can run over a variety of access networks.

This new global service standard for VoIP with multimedia support provides a foundation for products that can offer fi xed-mobile convergence of services, networks, and devices. The service combines the quality, interoperability, reliability, effi ciency, and renowned supplementary services of traditional telephony with the rich media and dynamics of Internet community-based communication. As such, it can be positioned both as a new service for driving operator revenue and as a replacement for circuit-switched telephony.

This is a summary of an article that appeared in the Ericsson Review. It can be downloaded at: www.ericsson.com/ericsson/corpinfo/publications/review/2007_02/02.shtml

IPX: A GLOBAL, PRIVATE, IP NETWORK FOR EVERYONEIt’s not an oxymoron. It’s a private IP interconnection solution for carriers and trusted service providers. But we’ll all be using this service-delivery solution in the future–one reason being the availability of high-quality, low-cost roaming.

In a nutshell, IP exchange (IPX) is a private IP interworking network that operators will use to exchange traffi c. It won’t be accessible from the Internet, so it should be secure, and quality of service (QoS) will be managed using the DiffServ traffi c class methodology.

IPX isn’t rocket science. Fixed and mobile network operators as well as service providers simply connect to each other via the fat pipes of a “carrier’s

carrier” using agreed upon specifi cations. Large operators may connect directly to each other, but since there are around 740 mobile operators around the world, bilateral deals are clearly impractical. Instead, operators will employ the services of a trusted “broker;” i.e., operators connect to the nearest broker.

Brokers aggregate the traffi c, and they connect to other brokers in order to create a global network. Thus, everybody has a virtual connection to everybody else. Brokers also handle the billing. Parties who meet their mutual obligations in the value chain receive a fair commercial return.

Setting up an operation of this size clearly takes time, and it’s a very signifi cant development, but it’s driven by the need to be competitive with those Internet-centric service providers. If they weren’t there, it wouldn’t happen.


http://www.telecom.co.nz

http://www.worldxchange.com



http://www.ericsson.com/ericsson/corpinfo/publications/review/2007_02/02.shtml

http://www.ericsson.com/ericsson/corpinfo/publications/review/2007_02/02.shtml


For many femtocell industry participants, 2008 will be some-what of a “block and tackle” year. A handful of carriers–Sprint most noticeably among them to date–are engaging in commer-cial adoption of femtocell technology, either to enhance coverage or capacity as the battle for telephony customers continues to be waged on the fi nal frontier: the residence. Increasingly, industry participants think that 2008 is “the year” that serious carrier trials and deployments have to take place to carry forward momentum in the years ahead.

“We are seeing signifi cant increases in the interest from equip-ment vendors, and there are several projects under way to build femtocells,” says Rick Pitz, Senior Product Manager and Business Development Manager at Certicom (www.certicom.com), an en-cryption and security tools developer that also builds UMA de-vice software. “We take this to mean that the vendors are seeing enough interest from the carriers to warrant the investment in new developments…which is usually a sign that the market is getting ready to move.”

Rehan Jalil, President and CEO of WiChorus (www.wichorus.com), a developer of intelligent gateways for WiMAX and other mobility platforms, agrees. “There is clear evidence that there is momentum behind femtocells, especially on the 3G side in the early part of 2008…. WiMAX femtocells will probably get more traction in the later part of 2008 or in 2009.”

Femtos give a carrier the ability to service customers in their own home networks in a way that the “macro network” does not, in the opinion of Steve Shaw, Associate Vice President of Marketing at Kineto Wireless (www.kineto.com). “Femtos let you target ser-vices for the mobile phone user at home…. They make it easy for consumers to use the mobile device [at home] in ways that allow them to do other things.” Being in a “femto zone” at home, he believes, allows for mobile users to access “personal data services, social networking, and instant messaging.”

Some see inevitability; others see urgency. “There has been a lot of R&D investment, but the proof is in the pudding–real-world trials. It is critical that we see deployment in 2008,” says Michael McFarland, Senior Product Manager, CDMA, for Airvana (www.

airvana.com). He sees the pressing need to get things rolling be-cause they have to. The home is the last frontier for traditional mobile carriers, which need not only better coverage in residential markets. Some would argue that need for network coverage alone has prompted Sprint’s femto foray, but this isn’t exactly the point that a carrier wants to put across in marketing literature. As one industry pundit wisecracked, “You can’t get subscribers to pay be-cause your coverage sucks.”

But more deployments also mean more scale, and scale means cheaper femtos, and with that, a fair chance at getting to the estimated 30 million units that some industry ana-lysts predict will be in service by 2012. “To get WiFi router price points [under US$100] out of ‘collapsed’ femtocell base stations, they need to be sold in the volumes, and that’s going to take sev-eral generations,” notes McFarland, adding that for WiFi routers to get to their current costs, they needed roughly a half dozen generations. In other words, if the mobile industry doesn’t start deploying femtocells now, it will never get to the point where fem-tocells will make economic sense for carriers or the customers they are trying to reach.

But like many things in the “next-generation” industry, there is increasing evidence that this traction may be accelerated if fem-tocell technology can be deployed in multimedia or multi-service contexts. Using femtocells to provide support for data-hungry ap-plications like IPTV backhaul, for instance, is seen by some as an additional “hook” into the triple/quadruple/multi-play home. “Femtocells as a cell tower replacement is not enough–there need to be additional services,” opines Aaron Sipper, Director of Product Marketing, NextPoint Networks (www.nextpoint.com).

There is some debate as to whether femtocells themselves would serve as the carriage point for a lot of that traffi c although most think that it will not be; rather, the femtocell will be com-bined with other technology to ensure that wireless traffi c from the “outside world” gets routed onto a home network in the most cost- and spectrum-effi cient way–but that the mobile device re-mains the core navigational tool for the consumer even when at

violentfemtosby Ross O’Brien

Femtocells make a lot of sense, both as an access tool to increase coverage and as a leverage point to get into the home–the converged carrier’s last battlefi eld.


http://www.certicom.com

http://www.kineto.com

http://www.nextpoint.com


http://www.airvana.com

http://www.airvana.com


home. “Adding multi-service capabilities when a subscriber is on a femtocell can be an incentive for consumers to adopt femto-cells;” says Jalil, “however, femtocell [deployment] will primarily be driven by coverage requirements.”

That said, there is a little Swiss Army Knife movement in the industry. “I think putting a branded device in the home as well as creating a ‘home zone’ service offer is critical for operators go-ing forward,” says Shaw. “Next-generation Home Zone 2.0 solu-tions based on WiFi or femtocells which use the public Internet to lower service delivery costs are key.”

“We are seeing a fair amount of interest in combining more and more functions into a single solution, [such as] a WiFi access point combined with a femtocell and a home router,” says Pitz. However, this is more driven by the desire of home network appliance ven-dors looking for an entry point by leveraging a “relationship” with femtocell connectivity than carriers looking to proactively extend their footprint into consumer’s gear. “The challenge right now is getting the price points down” for femtocells, as mentioned, to make economic sense for both consumers and carriers. “This is somewhat of a dichotomy…. Added services support makes prod-ucts more attractive to consumers and generates more revenue [potentially] for the carrier–but that added functionality increases cost” when the industry is looking for femtocells to, above all, be a capacity-and-coverage enhancement that comes without cost.There is no denying, however, that multimedia services and multimode devices are accelerating the proliferation of con-nectivity-enabled devices in the consumer’s home, and this is only likely to increase. Samsung’s UBcell technology has “a data component and a means to control your TV and record-ers,” observes Sipper. If femtocells do take off as an extension strategy, they will also be a more integral part of these multi-mode ecosystems, whether through carrier push or home net-work vendor pull. Could they then help carriers manage the multiple devices that their users are using to access services?For many in the industry, the answer is not really. Jalil sees a carri-er’s femtocell strategy as being akin to any other access technology deployment. “The model of managing consumer’s personal devic-es is not widespread in other broadband data segments like cable and DSL with WiFi embedded gateways,” he says. ‘Femtocells don’t change anything signifi cant.”

There is also the question of business strategy. “I’m not sure that carriers really want to manage the consumers’ products, nor do I believe that consumers want the carrier to have control over their equipment–until something breaks, that is,” be-lieves Pitz, who acknowledges that this, however, is a challenge for the industry.

There may even be some more pragmatic reasons for this. “Operators are very protective of their licensed spectrum,” says Shaw. He doesn’t envision 3G spectrum as being the transmis-

sion medium for home networking, and indeed, “it’s hard to see it as anything other than mobile service…. Using femtocell-enabled spectrum for home network management, you’d need UMTS between your TV and your DSLAM,” which he believes is unlikely. That said, he doesn’t doubt that carriers (and the vendors who love them) won’t be grouping all these various ac-cess channels into, in his words, “a ‘god-box’ to the home…but the frequency [for home networking] will be WiFi. You won’t be able to control your TiVo with UMTS” although your mobile phone could talk to the rest of the network when it gets home to make that switch.

“As more and more device types get deployed, users have a big-ger task managing them,” and most consumers do not want to be their “own IT department…. One could make a good argument for buying everything from one vendor if that vendor had a good management infrastructure.” All in all, Pitz, like many in the in-dustry, doesn’t see femtocells as being a defi nitive step into the carrier-managed home network. “Clearly, having a device in the home opens a potential portal, but the femtocell in and of itself doesn’t seem to be the solution.”

Others, such as McFarland, disagree. “Operators are concerned about the proliferation of devices that they have to manage…. Integrating femtocells [into home-access solutions] makes man-agement sense.”

Beyond management of devices, there is also some debate as to what the platform will be that these multitudinous devices will share that will allow them to switch seamlessly over from the mo-bile network to the home network. UMA is seen by many (though not all) to be the key to the device-centered future of femtocells; the technology obviously originally got its start as the enabling fabric for a WiFi-centric path from the home to the core. In FMC’s second life, where the mobile network reaches all the way to the home, says Sipper, “UMA had to latch onto femtocell technology, even though it was built to deliver over WiFi…. Vendors say they can do femto as well as leveraging hotspots.”

At the end of the day, whether femtos are being used as a means for mobile-centric carriers to appropriate the home network space or simply as an enabler of a more seamless mobile-to-fi xed transi-tion experience, “the right strategy is fl exibility. WiFi/cell dual-mode base stations allow operators to converge the core,” accord-ing to Sipper. “They need to have a migration strategy which will allow them to fi rst capture the base, then build a gateway model, and then offer service over a pure IP layer.” The end game in fem-tos, it appears, is one commonly recognized by everyone in the VON-osphere. V

Ross O’Brien, our Asia/Pacifi c Editor, is a long-time telecom analyst, consultant, writer, and speaker who regularly appears on CNBC and CNN. He is headquartered in Hong Kong. You can reach him [email protected].





SIP trunking is moving forward, perhaps not as fast as many would like. But the steady progress SIP is making in both enterprise-to-enterprise and carrier-to-carrier transversals is signaling a broader shift in the industry: fi nally, a real conversion of TDM voice-centric business models that will transform the nature of enterprise-telecom services. by Ross O’Brien

SIP trunking, like many highly anticipated innovations/evolutions in the IP communications world, is gaining traction, but adoption rates are still disappointing to most industry advocates and participants. Part of this frustration is certainly due to the normal stress caused by the communications industry’s perpetual hype machine, which always seeks to create a sense of urgen-cy and revolution in every possible new technology.

And yet, it appears there is something slightly more than “normal” unmet expectations. In SIP trunking, we have an industry that is (perhaps uncharacteristically) working hard at creating unifying inter-operability standards, the absence of which is usually the primary hurdle for adoption of IP solutions, and most carriers now have some sort of service solution. Still, only a handful of the most technology-forward and visionary enterprises are committing themselves to SIP trunking. Some are blaming the lack of compelling unifi ed communication (UC) applications, which would be the true catalyst driving peer-to-peer pure-IP transactions. If that’s the case, does that make SIP trunking deployment dependent on yet another IP technology “revolution,” one that is even further away, and one with a value proposition still yet to be clearly defi ned?

“Certainly, it is moving slower than expected,” says Olle Westerberg, CEO at Ingate Systems (www.ingate.com), a developer of SIP-capable fi rewalls and security solutions. He sees this largely due to the fact that “there is still an enormous information gap on SIP trunking. Vendors aren’t explaining how it works–or even that it works.” This probably goes a long way to describing the Stockholm-based player’s development of an industry education portal, the SIP Trunk Network (SIPtrunk.org). “As technologists,

SIP It Up


http://www.ingate.com

http://SIPtrunk.org



we always want things faster,” says Todd Landry, Senior Vice President at NEC Sphere Communications (www.spherecom.com). “Do I want SIP trunking to be ubiquitous? Sure…but the lag time is needed to build acceptance and have [the industry] fi nd value.”

The advocacy is needed in some sense because of the in-ertia created by traditional, TDM-based enterprise services. Westerberg admits it’s hard to convince service operators that they can “realize rapid ROI” with SIP, as “it’s competing with a 100-year-old machine that works.”

Some industry participants feel, however, that relatively speaking there has been signifi cant progress. According to James Rafferty, Product Line Director for Media Gateways at Dialogic (www.dialogic.com), “there are a lot of SIP-based products out in the marketplace, and we are seeing TDM-to-IP switching take hold.” Rafferty believes that SIPConnect is robust enough to work well for most enterprise applications, even if there are “a few RFCs that are not yet complete…. People are using what they’ve got.” There is perhaps more tinkering in the SIP trunk-ing space–“a lot of interoperability testing”–than actual deploy-ments, but that’s somewhat par for the course. “Under the best circumstances, you’d only see signifi cant development begin-ning fi ve years” after a new technology has launched, Rafferty believes, pointing out that SIP has only really just crossed that fi ve-year mark.

That said, Ingate’s Westerberg does see the industry as hav-ing some traction and believes that traction will increase as a couple of industry “demographic” shifts occur. The fi rst is that increase in SIP trunking adoption is inevitable with the proliferation of IP in both enterprise environments (on the LAN) and in networks (in the core). The “middle conver-sion” (trunking) will take place when enterprises then real-ize that there is a better-than-TDM voice quality benefi t to going IP.

From SIP Trunking to UC Trunking?The second is more of a cultural shift. Westerberg sees the way younger communications users multitask through voice, in-stant messaging, and e-mail as being a major catalyst. “The real [SIP adoption] trigger will be when members of the MSN gener-ation become business decision makers; they’ll be asking, “Why can’t I do this?” IP will take over because enterprises need voice integrated with other media.” Patrick Ferriter, Senior Director of Product Management at Polycom (www.polycom.com) con-curs. “SIP trunking is extendable for unifi ed communications,” pointing to emerging codecs like G729, which is becoming “ubiquitous for call center trunking” and other early UC-adopt-er enterprise verticals.

“Most carriers are working with vendors in a way that will impact the adoption of SIP standards” and ultimately the com-munications business itself, according to Sphere’s Landry. And he sees this SIP buildup as being far more than just TDM voice.

“High-defi nition calling, new video-oriented codecs, federated voice/video calling, and brokered presence information–when we start to see ‘unifi ed communications’ trunking as opposed to SIP trunking, that will be a truly differentiated service.” He admits the standards for enabling UC trunking are “not any-where near” ready. That said, the SIP Forum has done a tremen-dous job of enabling SIP transversals through easy inter-carrier certifi cation processes, and few industry-standard bodies are as progressive–and proactive–in anticipating industry intercon-nection requirements, which means that this multimedia future of SIP trunking will not be far behind.

This will also be facilitated by alternative enterprise-com-munication strategies built with voice as one application in a fi eld of many. Sphere, for one, is a proponent of enabling SIP trunking as part of an entirely software-based communications platform. These newer strategies will promote IP-to-IP peering across and between enterprises. Carriers will resist it for as long as possible, in the opinion of Ken Kuenzel, founder and CTO of Covergence (www.covergence.com), as it will further drop prices on T1s and OC3s, but it is inevitable. “Voice will become an application running over an IP network.” The eventual con-version of voice-centric networks into any-to-any transport lay-ers is having a signifi cant impact on SIP-enabled network ele-ments. Take Covergence’s session border controllers. “A session border controller’s function is changing,” says Kuenzel. “While they are still about security and access control, [vendors] are being asked to [make them] the next point of connection for routing applications.” Controllers are being used as mediating devices for managing service quality on application transver-sals over SIP trunks, “balancing cost versus quality as they fi nd Layer Seven paths.”

HD Isn’t Just for Video AnymoreMultimedia applications might stoke longer term demand for SIP trunking as an all-purpose enterprise pipe, but many ven-dors are also focusing on rehabilitating the reputation of IP-delivered voice as a premium service, rather than as a cheaper, sub-carrier-class, alternative. Thus, the high-defi nition (HD) voice proposition is a signifi cant emerging trend in SIP applica-tions. This will also help prime the SIP trunking pump.

“The industry needs to think about VoIP beyond lower phone bills. It’s about great quality and more features,” according to Ferriter, who sees HD voice as a unique opportunity to lever-age the increasing amount of IP in the enterprise environment. HD voice applications have been a key component of Polycom’s call control product roadmap for over a year, and from the company’s vantage point, SIP-capable codecs have proliferated through the enterprise premise equipment universe enough to make HD voice both achievable and compelling. “SIPConnect has become standard in IP PBXs,” says Ferriter, who points to the G722 codec as the enabling catalyst, allowing for wideband (7Khz) audio, and thanks to the ADPCM compression, it con-

SIP It Up





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sumes as much bandwidth as the de facto SIP call standard G711 codec.

Sphere’s Landry, as well, sees HD au-dio as a critical next step in the “expan-sion of basic SIP functionality.” Overall, upgrading the value proposition of voice delivery is seen as the gateway applica-tion that can open up the possibilities of other next-generation routing capabili-ties, changing the premise of communi-cations services themselves. Landry sees presence, for instance, as another way to boost the promise of SIP trunking. “We often think of telecommunications as a purely ‘real-time’ offering, but messag-ing provides end users with an additional ability, while providing the SIP service provider with the intelligence to handle call routing even more effi ciently.”

SIP-ing Along, or Slowing Down?But ironically, while the promise of new, compelling features and multimedia-

capable SIP may provide the “tipping point” for adoption that vendors are look-ing for, it may also start adding complexity to the development process–and this may become a drag on SIP trunking’s forward momentum. “Is it taking too long? Is this an example of ‘Internet impatience,’ or is it the case that [as SIP interoperability develops], more applications need to be accommodated?” Rafferty asks, somewhat rhetorically. With SIP’s evolution, he reck-ons, “There are more moving parts,” and that translates into a longer development cycle.

Rafferty is also sensitive to the legacy issues of existing carriers, and feels that the industry has to appreciate that many of the current platforms, particularly SS7, are not only still technologically viable, “it is a relatively recent technology from which many, notably mobile operators, derive much of their revenues.” This is why Rafferty believes that “any-to-any” mapping is critical as SIP trunking ma-tures, “so carriers today do not leave large

chunks of existing customers behind.” Converting transversals to SIP trunks for enterprise customers will be mainly voice-based for the foreseeable future al-though Rafferty believes that video will be a considerable driver of SIP demand in the years to come.

But even if the SIP trunking revolu-tion remains a voice-based one, captur-ing more of that “application” in various contexts will give it a signifi cant next-generation nudge. Covergence’s Kuenzel, for one, sees SIP’s eventual foray into mo-bile voice as “the last step toward ubiq-uity…. Once that’s done, it’s truly game over,” with SIP trunks turning into “data pipes everywhere, with ubiquitous sets of content.” V

Ross O’Brien, our Asia/Pacifi c Editor, is a long-time telecom analyst, consultant, writer, and speaker who regularly ap-pears on CNBC and CNN. He is headquar-tered in Hong Kong. You can reach him at [email protected].

SIP It Up




http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm


http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm

http://www.telcobridges.com



SPOTLIGHT ON MicroTCA

The push for open-standard build-ing blocks within network gear has spawned some big and little results.

On the big side, the Advanced Tele-communications Computing Architec-ture (ATCA) has already matured into a standardized, carrier-grade platform for service providers.

Similarly, Micro Telecommunications Computing Architecture (MicroTCA), ATCA’s little brother, serves as a comple-mentary, smaller scale platform known for its cost-effectiveness and fl exibility.

Both platforms address different economies of scale and different parts of the Internet. Both are also no longer strictly telecom plays, making inroads into other markets such as enterprise, medical, military, and aerospace.

MicroTCA has many attractive fea-tures. Introduced in 2006, MicroTCA got a jump-start on development by us-ing the same base standards as ATCA, only on a tighter scale. MicroTCA sports a small form factor and there-fore offers both compact rack space and footprint–only 300mm deep including cabling. This comprises half the size of ATCA. On the chassis or shelf front, the gear is trending toward a scaled-down 1U height, or a “pizza box” with a densely packaged envelope.

As a platform, MicroTCA is hot swappable, NEBS compliant, and an open-standard architecture. MicroTCA does not demand the often-involved rebuild of other embedded systems, such as a PC/104 stack, a system best left untouched. PC104 stack reconfi gu-ration usually requires cracking open

a rugged cube to get at its buried in-nards. In comparison, MicroTCA uses a relatively small amount of energy, up to 60 watts, while still providing the fi ve nines of reliability required by many telecom companies.

Even so, MicroTCA is a little brother going through puberty–not quite devel-oped into the full maturity of univer-sal adoption as a platform. MicroTCA and product selection remain relatively limited because the industry is quietly fl eshing out version 1.0 of the standard.

“We’re pretty early in the cycle,” says Venkataraman Prasannan, Vice President for Advanced TCA and MicroTCA Platforms for Hillsboro, Ore.-based RadiSys Corp. (www.radisys.com). “It takes one to two years to fl ush out all the kinks in a new standard.”

The original equipment manufactur-ers (OEMs) and system integrators are busily testing early version, proof-of-concept MicroTCA gear in the form of backplanes, shelves, MicroTCA Carrier Hubs (MCHs) systems, connectors, power modules (PMs), and Advanced Mezzanine Cards (AMCs).

Justin Moll of Fremont, Calif.-based Elma Bustronic (www.bustronic.com) says there have been key advance-ments in interoperability and testing for MicroTCA.

“There have been several MicroTCA interoperability workshops to ensure products from various vendors work to-gether,” says Moll. “On the chassis front, products have evolved to modular con-fi gurations, allowing a wide range of op-tions with little to no customization.”

When ATCA Doesn’t FitAccording to Eric Heikkila, direc-tor of Natick, Mass.-based Venture Development Corp. (www.vdc-corp.com), there are plenty of places where ATCA, on the “big-iron” end of the spectrum, is the wrong hardware for the job, “overly robust, over priced, and simply overkill.”

The common denominator between ATCA and MicroTCA remains AMCs. AMCs act as building-block compo-nents that bridge the gap between ATCA’s network core applications and MicroTCA’s Internet access and telecom box functionality. This building-block component comprises a work-around to ATCA in the form of carrier blades with AMC modules. This setup has the potential to replace ATCA carrier blades for storage and networking ap-plications.

AMCs are also being used as stop-gaps.

“People are using AMCs with their existing baseboards and proprietary systems as an interim step until they fully migrate to MicroTCA,” says Nigel Forrester, Marketing Manager for MicroTCA at St. Louis, Mo.-based Emerson (www.gotoemerson.com).

Not a Beige BoxOn the downside, MicroTCA has not hit its stride as a ubiquitous product, meaning it has not yet become a “beige box” commodity, driving down costs. Things are still in the early adopter phase. There is still the inevitable resis-

MicroTCA for Enterprise:A Developing Kid with Huge Potential

by Greg Tally

continued on page 44


http://www.gotoemerson.com

http://www.radisys.com

http://www.bustronic.com


http://www.vdc-corp.com

http://www.vdc-corp.com


SPOTLIGHT ON SCE

Service Creation Environments (SCEs) continue to grow and support every-thing from integrated provisioning and customer service portals to quality of service monitoring and hooks to add on additional value-added features. There are as many ways to view SCEs as there are companies in the IP communica-tions world selling them.

Some companies say their custom-ers don’t want an SCE at all. “[Carriers] want us to deliver a solution,” says MetaSwitch’s Martin Taylor, Vice President of Product Management and Technology Strategy. “They want us to deliver a service rather than an environ-ment to create that service. Typically they don’t have the development en-gineers on staff. Their strengths are to identify what the service needs to do; our strengths are to rapidly respond to what they need to do.”

Over the years, MetaSwitch has con-sidered opening up its Service Creat-ion and Personalization Environment (SCAPE) to its customers, but few have expressed interest in having access to it. Instead, SCAPE is used by MetaSwitch’s engineers to develop and deliver ser-vices, while customers prefer to be one level and two levels up in the stack.

“We have a product we call the MetaSphere service delivery platform,” says Taylor. “With that, we have a port-folio of apps that include plain-old voice

mail, unifi ed messaging, fi nd-me/follow-me, [and] instant messaging…. We ar-chitected it fi rst to comply with our IMS architectural principals. It sits on top of the network with a SIP interface. Since most people don’t have IMS deployed, MetaSwtich is used as a gateway.”

The MetaSphere platform includes a number of APIs and also includes call processing and media server process-ing. The APIs allow customers to build their own front ends and service “mash-ups” based upon the fundamental ap-plications provided within MetaSphere. “Customers that do want to create their own front ends, customers who have built their own visual voice mail, use our APIs to [access the Web services portal,]” says Taylor. “Others take the client we provide them with. There’s a lot of fl exibility here, a lot of openness in our APIs.”

MetaSphere is presented as a unique offering in the SDP/SCE space. “We come very much from a telephony-focused background,” says Taylor. “We’re different from many of the other players that come from a much more generalist approach, particularly play-ers from the enterprise space. What they have is a very scalable environ-ment in Java. They’ve focused on the enterprise; now they’re bolting on tele-phony APIs.

“Where are the building blocks,

the essential components? They’re not there, so they’re starting from a much slower base. We have all those telepho-ny application building blocks to build services in much different ways.”

SCE Smashes to OSSOthers in the space have much stronger opinions of the role of the SCE within a carrier and believe many vendors cur-rently making OSS systems are trying to get into the SCE world.

“You’ve got the concept of service creation moving up in the network to address more traditional operational ap-plications,” says Brian Naughton, Vice President of Architecture and Strategy for Axiom Systems (www.axiomsys tems.com). “The OSS world and the SCE world are smashing together; they’re starting to blur together quite viciously. If you can get both–OSS and network–worlds to cooperate, you’ve truly got this agile factory that can bring new bundles to market very quickly.”

ConnectivityPlus, Axiom’s parent, and BT worked together for a number of years building management systems, in-cluding a management system handling a 400-site VPN network over frame re-lay for a banking concern. Axiom was spun out of ConnectivityPlus to work with carriers other than BT.

“Once we were spun out, the soft-ware evolved in managing complex

Making the Bits Work Together–

SERVICE CREATION ENVIRONMENTS

by Doug Mohney



http://www.axiomsystems.com

http://www.axiomsystems.com


SPOTLIGHT ON SCE

orders for networks, typically enterprise networks,” says Naughton. “The suite of software evolved from just an order man-ager to include network, inventory, acti-vation, all the stuff in a fulfi llment stack if you like.” As it grew, Axiom secured a number of incumbent fi xed-network pro-viders in Europe. “We pretty much have all the Tier 1s and Tier 2s in the fi xed world.”

Axiom’s experience and continued de-velopmental work enabled it to gain in-sight both into the needs of service pro-viders and mechanisms to give it what it wants. “If I can get the world that under-stands the session orchestration and the world that understands the order orches-tration, if I can get them to cooperate, that’s the key,” says Naughton. “I don’t think you’ll have one big box that under-stands both worlds; one vendor doesn’t do that. Nobody has the expertise to do all that right now.”

Over the last fi ve years, Axiom has introduced the concept of componentiz-ing “all of the bag of bits,” defi ned as a component framework and order man-agement. The company has built a whole suite of tools around the ability to bundle different modules together and to change the stack of software to take those com-ponents to create an end-to-end service.

“The cool thing is this is truly dynam-ic,” Naughton says. “A building block can declare dependents on other components that need me for end-to-end service…. Within days you can rebundle services. You can rebundle those services very, very quickly. The concept of bundling is very, very important. It was very, very important with VPNs fi ve years ago. The same requirement for bundling is now a requirement for consumer broadband and is becoming a requirement in mobile. It’s all driven by the move to IP; it doesn’t really matter if it’s IMS or not. It’s NGN. The defi nition of NGN is a converged network. At the edge of the network you can present any service that you want.”

Speed and a return on investment mean the concept of quickly rebundling servic-es is quite popular. “Most of the Tier 1s take seven to 12 months to get their op-erations stack to understand the new ser-vices,” says Naughton. “You put a huge

investment into IMS; the whole point of IMS is to allow you to rebundle ser-vices. If you look at the IMS timeframe, the investments started many years ago. Now you look to apply the investment to the OSS stack. If it takes you a month to create the service, 12 months to get the service out, it’s a waste of the investment of IMS…. If you can bolt in services as quickly as you can, then change every-thing as quickly as you can at as low a cost as possible, then you become a fac-tory for cranking out new services.”

However, SCEs aren’t just for carri-ers. VisionOSS (www.visionoss.com) provides large enterprises a tool to con-solidate and manage their phone de-ployments. Initially developed to work with Cisco’s architecture, the company’s Business Voice Services Manager (BVSM)

provides a service-provisioning and man-agement platform for large enterprises (and service providers) to automate net-work confi guration, dial plan design and management, device and user provision-ing and management, as well as the day-to-day management of services, features, and applications. The system is designed to bring single-screen centralized man-agement to distributed and even multi-national IP telephony networks.

“When we approached this area of large-business voice deployment, we took

the view that generic OSS platforms didn’t fi t the job as closely as we felt it need-ed,” says VisionOSS’s Director of Strategy, Henry Barton. “What was required was a new product category that was designed from day one to support large-business ar-chitecture deployment. How do you sup-port large clusters, dial plans, volumes of phone, IP address management, and large numbers of phones?”

As larger organizations deploy IP tele-phony into their offi ces around the coun-try and around the globe, they end up with islands of deployments that have to talk to each other. “You can have these is-lands, and that’s fi ne,” says Barton. “The problem is how you scale that and how you perform a rapid migration and a rap-id introduction of service. You just physi-cally can’t do that [with islands].”

VisionOSS cites BT as its largest de-ployment exercise to prove the point. BT needed to track and confi gure 70,000 IP phones spread across 2,500 retail branch-es. “The sheer scale of it from the begin-ning required a different approach,” says Barton.

Before bringing in VisionOSS, BT was using macro-driven Excel spreadsheets to keep track of its deployments–not a scal-able tool when the steps involved to plug in a phone included a local tool to put the phone confi guration into the call-man-agement system and a separate tool in the softswitch for provisioning, plus invento-ry. “By the time you fi nish, there’s a huge opportunity for error,” Barton states. “As deployments get bigger and bigger, there’s a huge opportunity for error if you don’t have an automated platform.”

Using a single centralized software platform is delivering signifi cant speed advantages for deployments. “Lloyds TSB [investment banking] Group started roll-ing out [IP phones] last year to 10 sites a week,” says Barton. “Now they’re up to 60 sites a week, around 2,500 phones a month. In the next few months they will get up to 10,000 phones in a singe month. It’s probably the fastest anyone has confi gured [an IP] phone platform like this.” V

Doug Mohney can be reached at [email protected].



http://www.visionoss.com




The 2008 VON Magazine Innovator

Awards are designed to recognize the

companies and products that continue

to build the future of IP communica-

tions. Winners will be honored at

VON.x in San Jose on Tuesday, March

18, at 6 p.m. in the VON Theater,

including the announcement of the

Judge’s Top 10 List.

A more detailed discussion of the

Judge’s Top 10 List will appear in the

May/June issue of VON Magazine, in-

cluding commentary from the partici-

pating judges and the Chairman’s fi nal

thoughts on the 2008 awards process

and what companies should be pre-

pared for when applying for the 2009

awards in October.

The 2008 VON Magazine Innovator Awards

Doug Mohney, ChairBob Emmerson, Carl Ford, Bob Frankston, Joel Maloff and Ross O’Brien, Judges

COMPANY PRODUCTADTRAN NetVanta 1335Agito Networks Agito RoamAnywhere Mobilty RouterAlianza PowerPlatformAllworx Allworx 24XAzimuth Systems Azimuth FMC Performance Test SuiteBrix Networks BrixViewBroadsoft BroadSoft Unifi ed ConnectorChallenger Mobile mVoIP Platform Citrix Citrix EasyCallComdasys AG Comdasys FMC SolutionCommuniGate Systems Pronto!Cypress Communication C4 2007Dalcon Communications Systems Dalcon Communications Manager 2.0deltathree JoipDialogic Dialogic SS7, SIGTRAN, ATCADitech Networks Exi (Experience Intelligence)DiVitas Networks DiVitas Mobile-to-Mobile Convergence SolutionD-TAC VoIP Video Payphone for Hearing Impaired TravelersEmpirix Hammer G5Envysion Envysion VideoInGenius Software InGenius Applications BuilderIntelliverse CallEverywhere–ONEcalliotum Talk-Now ConferencingIperia IperiaVXIxia XMV16 Lan Services ModuleLifeSize Communications LifeSize ExpressLinksys/Cisco Wireless-G Broadband Router




COMPANY PRODUCT M5 Networks Voice as a Service M5T M5T-MC MegaPath Duet MetaSwitch MetaSphere Service Delivery Platform and Application Suite OrecX OrecX TR and QM Packet 8/8x8 Packet8 Complete Contact CenterPactolus Communications SIPware Event Audio Conferencing Service App.Pannaway Technology MAGNM-20Polycom SoundPoint IP 550 Desktop phoneQuanta Computer Syspine Digital Operator Phone SystemRedBack Networks SmartEdge 1200Sangoma Technologies A500 BRI CardSightSpeed SightSpeed Businesssnom snom m3Sonus Networks IMX 2.0Speakanet A/S GoHelloStonevoice SkyStoneStrix Systems EWS 150Super Technology GroovytelSutus Sutus Business Central Sylantro Systems Synergy Collaboration Gateway Symmetricom Q-400 Probe Synchronoss Technologies ConvergenceNow Software Platform TalkPlus TalkPlusTalkSwitch TalkSwitch VS Series IP PBX SystemTandberg TANDBERG Codian MCU 4500TelcoBridges Tmedia TMG3200 Media Gateway PlatformTeleCommunications Systems RAVE 911 Real Time Address Validation EngineTeltronics Cerato SEThomas Howe Company Voice MashupsVertical Communications Xcelerator IPvertico software STARFACEVisionOSS Unifi ed Services Manager (USM)VoIP Logic CortexVoipex VIBEVozTelecom OIGAAWyde Voice LLC VM 1000/3000 Conference ApplianceWildix Wildix Management System

VON INNOVATOR AWARDS

After Katrina, the New Orleans-based energy investmentfirm, Howard Weil, realized they needed a communicationsplan that could survive practically anything. Today, Cypress’hosted Voice over IP technology gives them the ability toreroute communications instantly. And Howard Weil enjoysthe added efficiency of unified communication featuressuch as Microsoft Outlook® integration, video conferencingand real-time collaboration. If you need a communicationssystem this robust, visit www.cypresscom.net/VON.

HOWARD WEIL INC. WORKS UNDER A CYPRESS SO THEY ARE NEVER OUT OF TOUCH WITH THEIR CUSTOMERS.

© 2008 Cypress Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Microsoft Outlook is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.


http://www.cypresscom.net/VON




Perceptual video quality monitoring based on what

customers actually experienceSymmetricom’s Q-400 monitors up to 400 SD or equivalent HD IPTV streams and up to 10,000 VoIP streams in parallel in full passive mode. The V-Factor QoE Platform, which includes the Q-400 Probe, is a unique perceptual video quality management solution designed to deliver an un-precedented understanding of video service quality in real time as experienced by end users. The end-to-end solution analyzes video content, and correlates content and network impairments from the core network to the customer premises equipment (CPE) to measure quality precisely as the user is experiencing it.

Symmetricom2300 Orchard ParkwaySan Jose, California 95131Tel: +1 408 433 0910

VoIP LogicTel: 310 279 4700www.voiplogic.com

VoIP Logic Receives “VON Magazine Innovators Award”

VoIP Logic, a leading provider of VoIP Managed Services and Solutions, is pleased to announce that it has been honored with the VON Magazine Innovators Award for its Cortex System Management Portal. Through the experience of its engineering team, coupled with industry partnerships that offer best-of-breed solutions, VoIP Logic simplifi es rollouts for carriers and service providers, while ensuring engineering and development support, and cost-effectiveness.

Cortex enables Service Providers to reduce the complexity of layering new technologies, and boasts customizable enterprise and consumer end-user Web-portals, full provisioning int-egration with applications from Sylantro, Iperia, Nextone, and HighDeal, fl exible ‘module-based’ login privileges, cross-system provisioning and management wizards. In January, VoIP Logic introduced its fi rst Web service API, which allows Service Providers to integrate with the provisioning and management of their end-user feature sets, phone services, messaging and billing.

Empirix Unveils the Complete VoIP Test Platform in Hammer G5

Empirix is excited to introduce Hammer G5, the fi fth generation of Hammer test products. The Hammer G5 test platform is the most comprehensive single-box solution for testing VoIP, NGN, and IMS infrastructure and applications. Built on Empirix’s Hammer FX (VoIP feature test) and Hammer NXT (high density VoIP load test) products, Hammer G5 addresses the need for integrated, comprehensive, and fl exible call profi les including feature and load on a single carrier-class testing platform that can scale from 4 to more than 200,000 endpoints.

To learn more about Hammer G5, send an email to [email protected], or visit: http://www.empirix.com/hammerg5.

Teltronics, Inc.2150 Whitfi eld Industrial WaySarasota, FL 34243Tel: 941.753.5000www.teltronics.com

Hardware ComponentsCerato SE- Satisfying Small Business Communications: The Teltronics’ Cerato SE, a powerful, user-friendly digital/VoIP phone system, integrates all the communication needs of a small business into a single platform. The system offers digital and Voice over IP (VoIP) communication, voice mail, automated attendant, unifi ed messaging, call recording, call routing, computer telephony and SIP trunking. The Cerato SE is also equipped with a built-in web server with a graphical user interface, digital and VoIP phone options, remote extensions for tele-workers and remote maintenance.

Cerato SE…Providing powerful, converged voice and data communication solutions for small businesses.

Empirix, Inc.20 Crosby DriveBedford, MA 01730Tel: 781-266-3200

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VisionOSS Unifi es

Unifi ed CommunicationsFaster UC Deployments; Simpler End-User Management

Facing hurdles in provisioning next-gen IP services? Can’t scale service activation because you’re stuck with separate network confi guration tools and management systems for each service element?

Talk to VisionOSS. We unify and automate your IPT network and UC service management. And allow you to manage your business through a simple, business-driven web portal.

Ask for our case study on a leading retail bank migrating 60 branches/week to Unifi ed Communications.

VisionOSS12801 Worldgate DriveSuite 500Herndon, Virginia20170 USATel: +1 (571) 203 7024 www.visionoss.com http://www.comdasys.com

The Award Winning Comdasys FMC Solution

The Award Winning Comdasys FMC Solution with Seamless Wifi <>Cellular Handover.

• Improves Mobile Business Communication while Lowering Cost.

• True Single Number, Single Device Solution.

• Seamless PBX Feature Integration.

• Designed for Businesses, Enterprises and Service Providers.

FREE On-Demand for Telephony Business

OIGAA is FREE On-demand Telephony for Business over Internet. It provides big-business feel to professional communications, cost reduction, productivity improvement and easy to run telephony capabilities. Everything the business would expect to be charged is FREE using OIGAA: Auto attendant, conferencing, music on hold, voice mail, presence, instant messaging and mobile integration. Unlimited phone extensions, unlimited lines and unlimited internet calls make OIGAA disruptive. OIGAA can be subscribed from www.oigaa.com and runs in few minutes through a web-based soft-phone application, while any SIP compliant IP-Phone can be attached for user communication at any time. OIGAA communication is FREE while users reside into the Internet.

Sign-up for a new communication experience at www.oigaa.com. Its technology is available too for service providers on a white-label basis, and today is powering JazzTel, Orbitel and Protel, as many other smaller ITSPs across 15 countries.

[email protected]

www.orecx.com

OrecX OS Call Recording Platform OrecX has a simple idea: Leverage the power of Open Source to provide customers with a call recording platform that is easy-to-use, easy-to-install & easy-to-maintain. We also decided to make it affordable and easy-to-buy. Our ongoing development platform ensures a substantially lower cost structure than proprietary voice recorders.

Introducing OREKA TR, with all the features you expect from your call recording application: Live Monitoring, On-Demand Recording, Selective Recording, Quality Management, Screen Recording, Call Playback, Look-Back Call Recording, Multi-Site Call Recording and Multi-tenancy for Hosted.

OREKA TR is full-feature call recording platform that is 30%-70% less expensive than the competition. We’ve made recording calls affordable, easy & reliable.

To view the OREKA TR product brief: http://www.orecx.com/oreka-tr-product-brief.pdf

Receive the performance you expect from your recording solution and have money left over to spend on growing your business.

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http://www.orecx.com/oreka-tr-product-brief.pdf

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SPOTLIGHT ON MicroTCA

tance to a new standard. “It’s a chicken and egg scenario,” says

Prasannan. “People need the cost tar-get before they say, ‘OK, I am ready to invest.’”

Even with the higher price tag, the potential for this platform is huge. Howard Glassman, Director of Business Development and Communications for Charlottesville, Va.-based GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms (www.gefanucem bedded.com), estimates that by 2010, the total market for ATCA and MicroTCA will comprise a roughly $3 billion industry.

In a market survey, the VDC estimates that the total number of businesses evalu-ating whether or not to deploy MicroTCA will grow from 13 to 60 percent by 2009.

TransformationA wide variety of vertical markets are dipping their toes in the water, preparing for the eventual plunge into the swim-ming pool.

So far, the most interest is being gener-ated by the military and aerospace indus-tries. The military is closely scrutinizing MicroTCA because of its overall philoso-phy of transformation. Transformation uses advanced communication technol-ogy to ensure that the link between the battlefi eld and the command center is real time. The idea is that the generals in the war room and the soldiers on the

ground share the same information to make better informed decisions. This re-quires smaller, portable gear that is fully ruggedized.

Therein lies a problem: MicroTCA is not yet fully rugged. “A working group within PICMG is now active with the goal of making additions to the defi nition of MicroTCA that will make the standard more rugged,” says Heikkila.

Glassman says the MicroTCA deploy-ment is being tested in relatively benign settings like aircraft and navy ships, while Prasannan pictures a more hardened fu-ture, with MicroTCA devices in soldier’s backpacks and strapped to Humvees.

“Communication networks are now re-quired to connect military personnel, ve-hicles, aircraft, and ships,” says Heikkila. “This means a network-centric computing architecture that offers connectivity, high bandwidth and lots of processing power.”

The gear will have to withstand ex-tremes of temperature and weather, vi-brations, as well as utilize a waterproof casing. Outside of the military, this could have applications for WiMAX base sta-tions and for railway transport.

Other ApplicationsAll the experts interviewed by VON Magazine identifi ed a wide variety of vertical markets and applications for MicroTCA, saying the platform has the potential to be the architecture of choice

in all of these industries:• Factory automation • Credit card authorization• Energy exploration • Railway transportation hubs• Medical imaging• 3G, LTE wireless

In the enterprise space, Prasannan de-scribes MicroTCA as suitable for physi-cally small-access nodes such as WiMAX base stations, digital subscriber line ac-cess multiplexers (DSLAMs), and low-end media gateways.

“There may be some use of MicroTCA in the enterprise; however, this will be for telecom-type applications such as IP PBXs and media servers,” says Simon Stanley, founder and Principal Consultant of Earlswood Marketing Limited (www.earlswoodmarketing.com), based in the United Kingdom.

MicroTCA will also push converged communication, merging voice, video, and data over a largely Ethernet fabric. Service providers are already offering VoIP, IP forwarding, IP Sec, IP fi ltering, and load balancing using MicroTCA de-vices.

In the years ahead, look for MicroTCA to rapidly mature as the modular plat-form of choice. Obviously, little brothers grow up fast. V

Greg Tally can be reached at gtally@von mag.com.

Pizza BoxElma is offering its 1U MicroBox as a fully integrated solution. This 19-inch rack-mount box features up to 10 modules in a com-pact 1U height. This includes six AMCs, a power module (PM), a J-TAG Switch Module (JSM) from MicroBlade, and 1 MicroTCA Carrier Hub (MCH). This integrated system offers high bandwidth, fl exibility, and monitoring in the 45mm x 465mm x 210mm size.Development PackageRadiSys offers a Promentum SYS-3005DK MicroTCA Development Kit aimed at helping telecommunications equipment manufactur-ers develop network elements geared toward a smaller form factor. The SYS-3005DK MicroTCA Development Kit includes a MicroTCA chassis with power module and a base MCH with options to extend fabric options. The development kit comes integrated with three RadiSys AMCs: AMC-8202 (MPC8641D PrAMC); AMC-7211 (Cavium OCTEON-based Gigabit line AMC); and AMC-3202 (SAS Hard Disk AMC). These AMCs enable customers to develop key applications for multiservice access applications based on Ethernet.

WiMAX Base StationIn 2007, Emerson demoed a proof of concept MicroTCA WiMAX base station featuring an Emerson MicroTCA system housed in a Knürr outdoor enclosure, an Intel WiMAX baseband processing card, E1/T1 and Gigabit Ethernet backhaul cards, and a system controller card. Emerson’s base station utilized its new MicroTCA EMC6000 Series platform, featuring independent control and data-plane operation. The system is equipped with a MicroTCA Carrier Hub (MCH) module, power supply, application/protocol processing, and a system controller card.2U and 8UIn September 2007, GE Fanuc rolled out two new MicroTCA plat-forms, the MicroTCA MP-2000 and MicroTCA MP-3000. The MicroTCA MP-2000 platform features a 2U, 13-slot MicroTCA chassis, while the MicroTCA MP-3000 features an 8U, 15-slot MicroTCA chassis. Both platforms come pre-confi gured with a power module, dual cooling units, and MicroTCA Carrier Hub (MCH) with PCI Express fabric module, together with an Intel-based processor.

A SMALL SAMPLING OF MICROTCA PRODUCTS

continued from page 37



http://www.gefanucembedded.com

http://www.gefanucembedded.com

http://www.earlswoodmarketing.com

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IP Phones & IP PBXs

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Unifi ed Communications Deployment Models

by Don Van DorenFocus on Unifi ed Communications

We are starting to see some pat-terns emerge in how unifi ed communi-cations (UC) is being deployed and used in enterprises. These patterns link who gets the capabilities, how are they being used, and what benefi ts accrue to the en-terprise. This column suggests a new way to deploy UC, built on these two current strategies.

Personal Productivity. UC provides many tools that can assist an individual in communicating with others such as presence awareness, linked directories, access to any communications device, integration with Offi ce applications, and many more. It’s easy to understand these UC tools and the ease-of-use benefi ts us-ers will experience.

Deployment is simple. Purchase equip-ment and user licenses for most of the employees in the enterprise, roll out the capabilities, and, with minimal training, users begin to incorporate these tools into their daily activities.

Presence becomes an integral part of communicating. Jason needs to talk to Nicole about her memo. He mouses over her name him, checks presence availabil-ity, and initiates a call that is routed auto-matically to her cell phone.

Business Process Integration. Most business activities do not run with assem-bly-line effi ciency. The steps in a business process are frequently interrupted by the need to obtain information, approval, or consensus from one or more individuals. These communications bottlenecks in-troduce delays into the process of com-pleting a sale, designing a new product, constructing a building, approving a loan, etc. UC capabilities can eliminate the bottlenecks by integrating communi-cations directly into the process.

The deployment approach identifi es those processes where delays are caused by communications bottlenecks and have the greatest impact (frequency, duration of delay, dollar value). Survey processes within a division or throughout the en-tire enterprise then determine which UC tools can best address the most important opportunities discovered.

In some cases, UC functionality will be provided by adding software within the workfl ow application that drives the pro-cess. The application itself “understands” that an approval is required as the next step, uses skills-based (not name-based) presence capabilities to identify an appro-priate, available resource, and launches the communications event. The commu-nications starts automatically; the em-ployee doesn’t initiate the process.

Justifi cation Challenges. Personal pro-ductivity deployments are easy to under-stand, and it’s easy to show people how to use the new tools.

The challenge, however, is that the personal productivity story often fails to generate much excitement among the protectors of the corporate purse. Too of-ten, the benefi ts are reduced to “improv-ing productivity” of those enjoying the UC tools. It’s diffi cult to develop believ-able “hard dollar” justifi cations based on accruing 17 minutes a day times 842 em-ployees times average pay per minute.

Business process justifi cations, on the other hand, are often easily developed. Most line-of-business managers can tell you the value of reducing cycle times, speeding a business process, cutting out steps, or reducing staff requirements to complete the work in their departments. Justifi cation is simply understanding how integrated communications eliminates

bottlenecks to achieve these improve-ments. Consistently we fi nd that cases driven by business-process integration have order-of-magnitude better return on investment than those focusing on per-sonal productivity deployments.

A New Approach. Done correctly, busi-ness-process integration is a big deal. In addition to the work of using SDKs to connect applications to UC APIs and perhaps in re-engineering a business process, there is the challenge of getting users to change their behavior. One way to assist in the change management is-sues is to get the users enthusiastic about the tools in advance of implementing the new techniques.

This leads to a deployment approach I’m calling “familiarization.” Enterprises do an evaluation of business-process op-portunities, determine the best approach, and roll out the UC infrastructure. The early emphasis is on showing the users how they can use the tools to improve their own effi ciencies. While those gains may or may not trickle down to the bot-tom line, they help the users make the transition to the use of UC.

When we subsequently introduce the new business-process improvements, the users will be familiar with the tools and how they help enable innovative com-munications. This approach will help en-list the users to become involved in the change process. Moreover, the users will generate ideas about how to further im-prove the targeted business processes or suggest other applications for improve-ments. V

Don Van Doren is president of Vanguard Communications. Contact him at dvando [email protected].






by Thomas Howe

It’s All about the Apps

The Consistency of VoiceIf you need any more evidence of the power of consistency, look no fur-ther than your local franchise restau-rant. With few exceptions, the best res-taurant in your town is not the Outback Steakhouse, but franchise restaurants are excellent examples of successful busi-nesses with high customer satisfaction. Chili’s, Friday’s, and The Olive Garden will never receive a four-star rating, but you’ll leave your table very satisfi ed with your experience. The comparison is more than gastronomic. Of all startup businesses, restaurants are consistently among the worst fi nancial performers–over 70 percent eventually fail–yet fran-chise restaurants have very high success rates. We laugh when Weird Al tells us that his lifelong dream is to get a part-time job at the Sizzler; the owner laughs as he deposits the night’s receipts.

For good reason, customers value and reward companies that provide consis-tent and predictable service. Many stud-ies by industrial psychologists show that customers truly do have a “better the devil you know” attitude, and rank sur-prises low on their list of desirable quali-ties from the companies they patronize. Apparently, lower quality products and services are OK, but the inability to pre-dict the quality of a service is not. We can see this in our own industry. For genera-tions, the most dependable thing was dial tone. Every time a customer picks up a handset, dial tone has been there. Cell phones are a radical lowering in terms of service reliability from landlines, yet most consumers accept this without complaint. We have a different expecta-tion from our landline phones and call the landline phone company with our mobile phones at the fi rst sign of trouble.

People are simply happier when they can predict the level of the service they are going to receive.

Automation is surely the friend of consistency, just as human behavior is the enemy. Mature businesses invest in process and process technology mainly to enforce consistency of service delivery, with the resultant benefi ts of higher lev-els of control, leading to higher customer satisfaction, lower operating costs, and higher profi t margins. Unlike employees who have to fi ll out forms and have com-pany-issued e-mail addresses, custom-ers are harder to loop into any corporate process. For both groups, though, fast and easy aren’t normally associated with fi lling out forms or searching through an inbox. I believe that voice is under-utilized in terms of its ability to enforce consistent and uniform collection and dissemination of data to the general pub-lic or larger workforce. Not only that, voice carries an immediacy that other communication forms simply lack yet good process commonly demands. With the advent of lightweight programming models and service-oriented architec-tures, sewing voice into the business pro-cess is not only feasible, but it is often a superior alternative to traditional forms and e-mails.

An excellent example of how voice enforces consistency is found with phar-maceutical trials. For Big Pharma, the success of a trial is dependent upon con-sistent and accurate collection of patient data. Today, patients carry notebooks to record drug interactions and side effects. At the end of the trial, these notebooks are collected and transcribed. How much more effective would voice be in the col-lection of this life-saving data? First of

all, people can speak faster than they can write, so they tend to be briefer as they write their notes, losing informa-tion. In addition, critical timing data may be lost since notebooks don’t automati-cally record the time you write on them. Notebooks can’t demand that you write in them, but automated dialers can call you if it’s been a while since you checked in. Notebooks can be lost; it’s harder to lose computers sitting in a data center. Notebooks can’t be updated in the fi eld; voice scripts can be updated at any time. All of these elements combine to make voice a data-collection mechanism that is consistent, appropriate, and universal. Consistency also has legal ramifi cations. Corporate liability exposures may be lim-ited or eliminated by consistent notifi ca-tion of internal and external parties. As an example, many corporations protect themselves through employee policies; it would be a benefi t to enforce the consis-tent and periodic notifi cations of them to employees. Automatic voice notifi cation is the perfect channel to make sure that these policies are heard by the employ-ees, especially when consents may be recorded.

Now that voice applications are simple to implement for organizations of all siz-es, they can be used as critical collectors and disseminators of information. Since we all have access to a phone somewhere in our lives, they can also be the platform for consistency. V

Thomas Howe is a long-time telecom con-sultant, writer, and speaker who is the CEO of the Thomas Howe Company, providing expertise in improving the business process with real-time communications. He can be reached at [email protected].





The Edge-Centricby David S. Isenberg

Ten Internet Talking Points for the Next U.S. PresidentBy the time you read this, the race for U.S. president will be more defi ned than it is as I write this. But Internet poli-cy issues will not change as quickly. Here are ten talking points on Internet policy for the next president, no matter who he or she is, no matter what party.

1. Critical Infrastructure: Today’s Int-ernet is every bit as important as roads, electricity, and clean water for commerce and economic growth. If all sectors of the U.S. economy are to grow as they did in the 1990s, we must have a world-class Internet infrastructure, beginning with fi ber to every home, supplemented with spectrum governed according to today’s technology–not the technology of 1927.

2. Direct Democracy: Today’s Internet is a platform for vigorous discussion of issues that once were available only via broadcast networks and newspapers. Because today’s Internet is key not only to an informed electorate, but also to unprecedented citizen participation, it holds the potential to revitalize U.S. democracy and in so doing, restore the moral regard the United States once com-manded among nations.

3. Freedom: Today’s Internet holds a threat of surveillance, suppression, and “total information awareness.” We must be vigilant to ensure that the Internet sup-ports the freedoms guaranteed by our Bill of Rights rather than undermines them.

4. Innovation: The Internet succeeds at nurturing new ideas because it carries infor-mation without regard for the origin, des-tination, form, content, or meaning. This keeps barriers to innovation low, so new ventures like Google, Amazon, and eBay can be discovered and grow. Companies that provide Internet access and trans-port must preserve this essential property;

they must not impede or privilege packets based on what is in those packets, where they came from, or where they’re going.

5. Leadership: The United States in-vented the Internet. But today the United States is somewhere between the 15th and 25th most wired nation, down from number three in 2000. President George W. Bush pledged to bring universal, af-fordable broadband to all Americans by 2007, yet today many Americans don’t have broadband or can’t afford it. Competition has shrunk to three gi-ant companies–AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast–and a handful of smaller ones. This is not acceptable. We need real com-petition or policy that enforces public

duty when market power is great.6. National Broadband Policy: The Un-

ited States is the only developed nation to-day without a national broadband policy that ensures state-of-the-art Internet ac-cess for all citizens in their homes, places of business, schools, hospitals, libraries, and on the go. Other nations have shown the way; we must learn from them.

7. Patents and Copyrights: The Int-ernet changes how intellectual property is used. The rights of information own-ers must be protected, but not at the ex-pense of the public’s rights to know and the people’s rights to create culture. The United States needs intellectual property law reform to harmonize it with today’s

technological advances.8. Malware: Spam, viruses, and spy-

ware are growing problems, but they need not be! It should be a crime to in-stall software on a computer without the informed consent of its owner. The polluters of the Internet must be tracked down and brought to justice. Technology exists to do this, but there have been only a few prosecutions. Existing laws should be enforced so the threat of jail is real.

9. Internet Crime: The Internet is a place where fraud, child abuse and exploitation, and other criminal activi-ties occur. Criminals perpetrating these crimes should not get a free pass just be-cause their crimes occur in cyberspace. They should be prosecuted. Our police and prosecutors should have suffi cient technology expertise to track and pros-ecute criminals in cyberspace.

10. Rebuild Network Research: Bell Labs used to be a national treasure, spin-ning off such ideas as the laser, the tran-sistor, and the digital signal processor, which are the heart of today’s Internet technology. Now that Bell Labs has shrunk to a mere development arm of Alcatel-Lucent, the United States must rebuild its network research capabili-ties. We should invest 10 billion dollars over 10 years in a National Institute of Network Research modeled on the National Institutes of Health, so the United States can reclaim its role as the leader in Internet technology. V

David S. Isenberg (isen at isen.com) wrote The Rise of the Stupid Network and found-ed isen.com LLC, a decidedly independent technology analysis fi rm. He spent 12 years at Bell Labs, where he was promoted to Distinguished Member of Technical Staff.

The United States is the only devel-oped nation today without a national broadband policy....


http://isen.com


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FFMC: One Number, MC: One Number, MMany Phones? any … · the many changes in the service-provider market–from mergers and acquisitions to new service offerings and technological