Content area
Full Text
Softswitches and media gateways are selling despite tight money.
WESTFORD, MASS. - Nestled in the woody hills of this rural town, 4-year-old Sonus Networks is emerging as a survivor in the battle for carriers' capital expenditures.
The strategy: Package two key pieces of equipment that carriers need to transition their voice networks from traditional circuit switching to packet switching.
"Carriers don't put pieces together," says Hassan Ahmed, Sonus' president and CEO. "They're lousy integrators. It's too difficult to build a piecemeal solution." To make carriers' lives easier, Sonus integrates two elements of next-generation network architecture, softswitches and media gateways.
Traditional circuit switched network gear irreversibly combines the hardware that switches phone calls and the software that gives the intelligence to properly route calls and adds call features such as call waiting or three-way conferencing.
The new architecture separates the software from the hardware. Softswitch software runs on off-- the-shelf servers. Media gateways are hardware, changing a circuit signal to IP frame relay ATM or vice versa, letting circuit-switched phone calls run on an IP network.
Sonus bets carriers will need a package of gateways...