US carriers and infrastructure providers are gathering
this week at the Telecom '04 trade show in Las Vegas amid rapid
changes in the telecommunications industry, including cable
companies roaring into the voice business and phone companies
switching on TV services.
VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) and the "triple play" of
bundled voice, video and data services are among the hot topics at
the show, which is sponsored by the US Telecom Association.
Executives of the nation's biggest incumbent carriers and cable
operators, as well as three commissioners of the US Federal
Communications Commission, will address industry participants at
the show, which is expected to draw about 5,000 attendees.
VoIP is now starting to enter the mainstream in business, with
large deployments announced recently at Ford Motor and Bank of
America.
At Telecom '04, VeriSign introduced a service to help VoIP
carriers offer a richer set of services on IP calls that travel
over the PSTN (public switched telephone network).
While VoIP systems use the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and
VXML (Voice Extensible Markup Language) protocols to communicate
information about calls, the PSTN uses SS7 (Signaling System 7).
VeriSign is introducing protocol conversion between the systems.
With one IP connection to VeriSign, a VoIP carrier or internet
service provider can have the signaling for its calls converted to
SS7 and carried over the public network.
VoIP's usefulness is limited today because it exists in islands,
said Tom Kershaw, vice-president of VoIP services at VeriSign.
The signals for special services such as blind transfer
(transferring a call and hanging up before the line is picked up)
may work on a certain type of PBX (private branch exchange) on one
enterprise LAN or one VoIP service provider's network, but not on
the public phone network or on other PBXes, Kershaw said.
That is a barrier to more advanced services such as IP
videoconferencing, he said.
With VeriSign's new SIP-7 Services carriers can connect to
VeriSign's SS7 infrastructure via a SIP-enabled softswitch and a
secure IP VPN (virtual private network).
VeriSign's network can link them into carrier networks
throughout North America and, optionally, some carrier networks in
Europe, Kershaw said. It will save these providers the cost of
equipment and personnel needed to handle SS7, he said.
Business VoIP is entering mainstream use, but it still has
interoperability problems when it comes to advanced features,
because suppliers keep adding their own extensions to industry
standards, according to Yankee Group analyst Jim Slaby.
VeriSign, a newcomer to telephony, apparently solved this
problem through "brute force", said Yankee Group analyst Zeus
Kerravala.
"It looks like they've been working on this for a number of
years," Kerravala said. SIP-7 Services could be a boon to
enterprises as well as service providers, allowing them to take
advantage of features that in many cases they have not had on IP
telephony systems.
Another trend in the Telecom '04 spotlight is using broadband
data connections for a "triple play" or even "quadruple play" of
services, which may include wireline voice, video, data and
wireless voice.
Cable companies are finding great success in some areas with
triple-play offerings of TV, high-speed internet access and VoIP,
and now telecommunications carriers are looking for ways to match
or beat them, analysts said.
Some companies at the show will be showing off products to fuel
those carriers' triple-play dreams. mPhase Technologies announced
its mPhase TV+ System, designed to let carriers worldwide offer
interactive IP video and data services over both copper and fibre
networks.
The company intends it as a turnkey system to be used on top of
carriers' existing infrastructure.
It is designed to work with DSLAMs (digital subscriber line
access multiplexers) and IP multicasting equipment from
multiple suppliers and to integrate with standard operations
support systems for maintenance, as well as standard carrier
services creation systems. A cluster architecture will allow for
load balancing for content distribution, it said.
Kasenna introduced TotalTV, a system for hosting IPTV (Internet
Protocol Television) services that includes rack-mounted hardware
and integrated middleware that delivers the user interface to the
subscriber's TV screen.
Because it has done the integration work, Kasenna can get
services up and running on a carrier's network in as little as 45
days, according to Chris Morgan, Kasenna's director of sales for
broadband service providers.
KPU Telecommunications is exploring TotalTV for an IPTV service
it hopes to offer by September 2005. KPU wants to offer video
services to compete with the local cable operator, which is already
starting to roll out VoIP elsewhere in its coverage area.
KPU wants to offer a richer service than the cable company's,
including features such as network-based PVR (personal video
recording) and TV screen pops for caller ID, said Brian Slick,
telecommunications marketing manager at KPU.
The small carrier has the benefit of fibre lines that go to
access devices that are no more than 6,000ft of copper wire from
most homes, though it may have to upgrade some of the access
devices, Slick said.
Irdeto Access, a unit of global media group Naspers, will
showcase two client products introduced last week for its Irdeto
Pisys for IPTV framework, which is intended to secure video content
distributed over broadband IP networks.
The company, a long-time supplieir of technology for set-top
boxes, said it has combined the security of smartcards, which are
relatively hard to "clone" in order to steal video services, with
the low cost of set-top-box software. Its Epsilon Card with
FlexiFlash technology is a smartcard for set-top boxes that allows
service providers to upload changes to the smartcard software, such
as countermeasures against piracy, remotely over the network.
Its SoftClient for the Pisys framework not only can be upgraded
over the network but also can be checked by the carrier, remotely,
for evidence that it has been hacked and needs to be upgraded with
a new encryption key, said Ellie Sanchez, marketing communications
manager at Irdeto.
Stephen Lawsonwrites for IDG News
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