New devices could ease 'Net bottlenecks

Ascend Communications, Inc. and 3Com Corp. are teaching their access concentrators to talk to telephone voice switches.

If successful, the plan could ease Internet bottlenecks and help migrate telephone networks to IP backbones of the future. Last week, both companies pledged to put telephone signaling technology into their access concentrators, allowing the devices to take dial-up Internet calls off the voice telephone network. These long-duration calls have been blamed for bogging down expensive telephone switches.

Instead of buying more telephone voice switches, phone companies could buy these smart access concentrators - at a tenth of the cost, the two companies claimed. Relieving the telephone switches could mean fewer failures when Internet service provider customers try to dial in to the Internet.

Later this year, Ascend's MAX and 3Com Corp.'s Total Control dial-up access switch lines will carry Signaling System 7 (SS7) software, the protocol stack telephone voice switches use to signal call setup and release, among other things.

SS7 software will enable the concentrators to sit within the phone company network and receive calls from customers dialing in to ISPs. The calls then would be switched to high-speed trunks linking the concentrators to ISP points of presence.

The access concentrators could fulfill that role as soon as the software is complete. But with further intelligence, the concentrators could be gateways between the public voice telephone network as it exists today and the IP backbones that traditional carriers are working toward. Today, phone companies operate separate data and voice networks, but they are starting the move toward single networks that handle both.

Putting voice on an IP backbone requires gateways that support the translation of voice-call signaling into IP addresses. In turn, those IP addresses must be associated with service-quality levels that support voice.

With this in place, voice traffic could then ride with data over a single carrier backbone, thereby reducing carrier costs. With competition finally heating up, these savings might be passed along to customers. 3Com is expected to roll out SS7 upgrades to its Total Control chassis over the course of the year. Ascend is expected to roll out voice over IP and SS7 support in the first quarter.