3Com outlines voice plan

Santa Clara, Calif.

3Com Corp. this week will announce its three-phase strategy for upgrading gear to support voice, video and data over a single packet network.

The company's so-called Multi-Service Evolution strategy relies on current and pending features of its Superstack II Remote Access, Total Control and AccessBuilder remote access boxes, as well as its CoreBuilder switches. The company was closemouthed about when specific features will be added to the three chassis lines. Anchoring the Multi-Service Evolution will be new products 3Com is developing with Siemens Corp. Siemens and 3Com last summer announced they would integrate 3Com's CoreBuilder with features of Siemens' Hicom products. Hicom combines hardware and software and adds public telephone network call features such as call forwarding, call transfer and conference calling to private networks.

Phase 1 of 3Com's strategy involves migrating voice traffic onto enterprise wide-area data networks to get rid of some dedicated voice lines and avoid paying phone tolls. That also lets customers get used to integrating real-time traffic such as voice on their networks, 3Com said.

Phase 2, which starts next year, will add more intelligence to the access gear so it can handle calls to and from the public phone network. Call management, call processing and other switching intelligence will be incorporated in the boxes so an Ethernet phone call, for example, can be routed to a PBX-attached phone.

Phase 3, slated for the second half of 1999. It will allow users to run voice over Ethernet LANs and integrate that traffic with frame relay, ATM and leased-line data traffic as well as the public telephone network.

Integrating different traffic types onto one network is a way to save money as well as support new services, said Tom Noto, IS manager for Station Casinos, Corp., in Las Vegas.

Running voice over an ATM backbone supported by 3Com gear already saves the company $400,000 per year by getting rid of voice trunks, he said.