Data Switching Finds Its Voice

Posted: 05/15/1999

Data Switching Finds Its Voice
Ability for VoIP Is Key Component of New Data Products
By Charlotte Wolter

As data, especially Internet protocol (IP) data, has become a larger part of the volume transported by carriers, the introduction of more and more products with larger capacities has been the trend at SUPERCOMM.

Now, carriers are seeing a new kind of data: voice, especially voice over IP (VoIP). SUPERCOMM '99 may well be the convention where IP voice first makes its mark as a significant product category for carriers, from emerging competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) to the largest incumbent LECs (ILECs) and PTTs.

VoIP for Carriers

Carrier-class products for VoIP will be among the stars of the show, where some of these products will mark certain companies' first foray into IP voice for a large-scale product. The top-tier traditional telephone equipment providers, some of whom already have announced IP telephony services, will show products to allow traditional carriers to get into the IP voice business.

Marilyn Suey, vice president of marketing, Assured Access Technology Inc., Milpitas, Calif., an Alcatel company--which will weigh in with an IP voice product of its own for Alcatel Networks Systems, Richardson, Texas--says the product launches are timely.

"This is the year voice and fax over IP with data is going to take off with new applications and new services, and crossover from the PSTN (public switched telephone network) to IP networks and back," Suey says.

Challenging the big players will be another group of companies--young Turks that include Castle Networks, Westford, Mass.; SALIX Technologies Inc., Gaithersburg, Md.; Sonus Networks, Westford, Mass.; TransMedia Communications Inc., San Jose, Calif.; and Taqua Systems Inc., Centerville, Mass.--that will be at SUPERCOMM with highly touted carrier-grade IP voice switches, some of which have already been announced. Those products will have their formal coming-out party at the convention.

Assured Access, acquired by Alcatel in March, will deliver its first carrier-grade IP voice product, the Universal Access Gateway, at SUPERCOMM. The signaling system 7 (SS7)-capable product will put voice, fax and data over IP using a platform that is within the company's current remote access family.

The product enables an ILEC, CLEC or next-generation network provider to offer any-to-any IP services, from phone-to-phone and fax-to-fax, to hybrid connections, such as IP phone, to plain old telephone service (POTS). The inputs are T1s or channelized T3s with asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), fast Ethernet or frame relay output. Universal Access Gateway allows a carrier to provide seamless services across IP or standard networks without special customer premises equipment (CPE) or access codes.

"It means a user can get on any instrument and make a voice, fax or data call, and the type of instrument doesn't matter," Suey says. "They don't have to be on a computer or special terminal that is made for a specific network."

One shelf supports 1,920 sessions or just less than 5,900 sessions in a 7-foot rack, and each session can be either voice, data or fax. Suey says voice, fax and data can be supported at the same cost as just V.90 services today. "For a service provider, we are rolling out three times the capacity at the same cost point as a data-only solution."

The "young Turk" switches by Castle, SALIX, Sonus, Taqua and TransMedia represent an entirely new generation of technology-agnostic multiservice edge switches that are particularly attuned to IP voice, though most offer any-to-any switching for IP voice, POTS, fax, IP fax and data.

They are aiming directly at the large-carrier market and at the Class 5/Class 4 switch space currently dominated by the traditional vendors, although early on their customers likely will be concentrated among new service providers just launching networks. Port densities for the products are in the range of 50,000 to 60,000 voice ports per 7-foot rack.

Sonus and TransMedia officially will launch at SUPERCOMM, while Castle and SALIX already have debuted their products. Castle has products in beta, and is close to announcing its first paying customer. Sonus and TransMedia expect to announce final product specs at SUPERCOMM, as well as beta customers and technology partners.

TransMedia specifically offers inputs ranging from DS-0 to OC-48, and switching that can handle, for example, ATM in and IP out, or PSTN in and ATM out.

Besides officially announcing its GSX9000 Central Office Voice-over-IP Switch with open services architecture at SUPERCOMM, Sonus also will reveal beta test sites, its first customer shipments and technology partners.

Taking Class 5 to the Next Level

Siemens Telecom Networks, Boca Raton, Fla., and Nortel Networks, Richardson, Texas, already have announced this spring that they will incorporate a VoIP gateway in their Class 5 switches, such as Nortel is doing with its SUCCESSION products. Other traditional circuit-switched vendors are expected to follow suit at SUPERCOMM, as the interest of carriers in IP telephony has been heating up in recent months.

The Siemens product is scaleable to 100,000 lines, giving an indication of the level of functionality that vendors consider appropriate for large carriers. It will have SS7 capability, will support credit/debit and prepaid services and will give VoIP access directly out of the switch.

The product is not compatible yet with the iNow! H.323 interoperability standard being supported by Cisco Systems Inc., San Jose, Calif.; Lucent Technologies Inc., Murray Hill, N.J.; and VocalTec Communications Ltd., Herzliya, Israel, but Siemens plans to make it interoperable.

Meanwhile, Lucent also has in the works a migration path to IP for its Class 5 switches, which is expected to be announced just before SUPERCOMM.

Ericsson Inc., Richardson, Texas, will introduce an Internet Access Server (IAS) for IP voice integrated in its widely deployed AXE platform for international gateways and end-office switches. The IAS is hardware and software that enables an AXE switch to terminate modem or integrated services digital network (ISDN) calls in the switch and also convert connection-oriented traffic to packet data (IP packets). Ericsson has integrated the access server with the switch to use the switch's superior performance in terminating connection-oriented dial-up sessions.

Ericsson also will offer the Exchange Terminal (ET) 155, which replaces an existing product for termination of synchronous transport module 1 (STM-1) traffic toward AXE10 (an international gateway switch). The new ET allows termination of the STM-1 and its payload directly to a group switch.

Multiservice Access Products

The cornucopia of multiservice edge products--more and more with IP voice as one of their flavors--will continue to overflow at SUPERCOMM. Greg Wortman, senior director of marketing, Fujitsu Network Transmission Systems Inc., Richardson, Texas, says multiservice switching has become an industry "hot topic" in the last year, with a new standards group, the Multiservice Switch Forum, now attempting to make standards. The group will recommend standards that likely would be enacted by the ATM Forum or the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

Fujitsu will show the Nexen 8000 Multiservice Switch, a 10-gigabits-per-second (gbps) backplane switch that provides a high degree of service flexibility. The services supported include transparent local area network (LAN) service using 10Base-T or 100Base-T Ethernet, IP, VoIP, voice over frame relay (VoFR), frame relay, ATM and frame relay/ATM interworking. The output is OC-12 ATM to a network interface. The company feels the NEBS-compliant box is an ideal CLEC product that can be located on a customer premises for a single customer or in a large office building serving multiple customers. The price for a fully loaded implementation would be around $250,000, Wortman says.

According to Fujitsu, the Nexen 8000 uses a protocol switching standard known as cell tagging, or quantum flow control, for efficient bandwidth usage, a boon for those CLECs that do not have uncommitted bandwidth.

General DataComm Inc., Middlebury, Conn., also is aiming for bandwidth efficiency with a carrier-class access product that will internetwork voice, IP and ATM traffic with guaranteed quality of service (QoS) into broadband core networks. Although it would give few details before SUPERCOMM, General DataComm says a priority with the product was to provide quick return on investment (ROI) for service providers.

Meanwhile, Ascend Communications Inc., Alameda, Calif., says it will introduce new interfaces for private-line services to its ATM and frame relay switches, which it sells predominantly to the carrier market. The company will announce details at SUPERCOMM.

Redstone Communications Inc., Westford, Mass., will introduce two router/switcher products, the RX700 and RX1400, from the RX router product family. These are the first products announced by 18-month-old Redstone since it was acquired by Siemens in March. The switch/routers are aimed at CLECs that want to provide customers with high-speed access to the Internet, at speeds from 56 kilobits per second (kbps) to T3. It has 1,000 T1 ports in a single chassis.

The router supports all Internet routing protocols and uses the company's own application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology for wire-speed routing of 40-byte packets, which is associated with IP voice. According to the company, the RX products fill a gap between dial-up products and core routers where there is a need for edge products giving dedicated access.

Redstone President Jim Dolce says the company comes down firmly on the side of IP in the current controversy about IP vs. ATM as the underlying transport in next-generation networks. Most of the traffic emanating from enterprises to the public network is in the form of IP, Dolce says, "therefore, the most convenient way to transport it over the public network is to continue as IP."

Also, Dolce says, QoS issues in IP are being resolved.

"The ATM pundits were winning primarily because ATM could offer quality of service and IP could not. Now the IP guys have caught up and are able to offer quality of service like ATM. We are finding a lot of momentum for everything converging on IP."

Behind the access domain, equipment vendors such as Nexabit Networks Inc., Westborough, Mass., and Avici Systems Inc., Chelmsford, Mass., have begun to introduce terabit routers, products designed to do the heavy lifting of high-bandwidth data networks, switching IP packets at speeds from 60gbps to a terabit per second. Nortel believes there is a space for an intermediate product, especially for CLECs that do not generate traffic flow at the terabit level yet.

"It would be smaller [than a terabit router], but smaller is a relative term because it would be bigger than many products you see today," says Arun Jain, Nortel director of product marketing.

The product also would be aimed at enterprises that need higher-speed access than generally available today. "A lot of the bigger enterprises buy high-speed connections, DS-3 and OC-3, and need something for IP access, and this platform would be the one to do it," Jain says.

One reason enterprises need increased capacity is IP voice. "A lot of enterprise routers this year will start to put voice devices on them, whether integrated with the PBX (public branch exchange) or their own voice [on a virtual private network]," he says. As this traffic is carried, there will be a need to create a network that has the capacity to carry voice.

Although Nortel has not released details of the router yet, in general, Jain says, these devices will need multiple interfaces to many different services coming out of enterprises, but just a few interfaces on the trunk side. The reason is that these routers will be the point where much of the classification, policing and billing functions will be performed.

"These products are going to be the real brains of voice-over-IP services going forward. Whatever the IP services, the device that is closest to the customer will have to do a lot of smart things like quality-of-service billing."

If the network uses a protocol, such as DiffServ, which is a method of providing QoS across the network, there would be edge aggregation routers that would perform the policing and do the classifying of the packets for the rest of the network.

They would have to be very fast to do the classifying at wire speeds. One strategy to improve performance there, Jain says, is to separate the forwarding and routing functions. Routing remains in software, but the heavy-duty forwarding, which maximizes performance, is implemented on ASICs. Also, ASICs are made microprogrammable to add new protocols as they are developed. And because more of the traffic will be voice, they will need to support low latency and anti-jitter provisions.

Lastly, customers will want the same performance and reliability from an IP network they now get from private-line services. If these platforms and their networks can deliver these functions, Jain says, platforms that deliver both data and multimedia services "would essentially start to replace a lot of the private-line services that exist today." Nortel will reveal product details at SUPERCOMM.

Other Products

Lucent will extend the PathStar IP voice server product that it introduced May 1998 and that it is relaunching now with a new feature called the Business Service Exchange (BSE), which can be a standalone server or be linked to an access server. Based on the Inferno operating system, it is a way for a CLEC to provide managed outsourced IP voice and data services to customers.

It also can be used to route voice and data within a building or enterprise. Rather than having a customer buy Centrex, a router and gateway, and maintain that equipment, the service provider operates it. The BSE could be located in a large office building, medium-sized business or even a multiple-dwelling unit (MDU). The BSE would link to the core of the network via IP over DS-3, multiple T1s, OC-3 or frame relay.

Lastly, Ericsson will show its PC-based Ericsson Least-Cost Routing (ELCR) tool that assists international simple resale (ISR) managers in making decisions as to the quality of routes available to them.

The ELCR helps configure the network so each incoming call is connected onward to an available carrier that offers the lowest charge to the given destination, while ensuring service standards.