3Com, Siemens team up to offer voice over IP

Santa Clara, Calif.

3Com Corp. and Siemens AG last week introduced products to promote the integration of voice and IP traffic on corporate networks and service-provider networks.

For corporate networks, 3Com/Siemens announced a jointly developed IP-voice gateway that will lash together an Ethernet switch and a PBX. That three-box combination will let corporate users run voice traffic over their corporate IP networks rather than over more expensive public long-distance lines or

private voice trunks. Voice calls originating on a Siemens Hicom PBX and destined for another corporate site would be switched to the Real Time Communications Gateway.

The gateway converts the call to IP and passes it along to a 3Com SuperStack II 1100 Ethernet or a 3300 Fast Ethernet switch, which directs it to a router that has an IP WAN port. The call travels over the wide area on the corporate data network, avoiding the public network and reducing the need for dedicated site-to-site voice trunks. A similar arrangement at the receiving end switches the call to its destination.

The gateway would give voice packets top priority through the network to reduce latency that can degrade voice quality.

Problem priority

One drawback is that the priority scheme will not carry through a public data network, according to Lisa Allocca, an analyst with Renaissance Worldwide, a consultancy in Newton, Mass.

However, 3Com said it is working on a way for the priority to be carried across public ATM networks. 3Com will enable its routers to put voice packets in top-priority queues and then map those high-priority packets to the appropriate ATM service quality for transport across the public ATM network. Allocca said the IP-voice gateway scheme should help collapse corporate voice and data networks and potentially reduce the number of wide-area trunks an enterprise needs.

The gateway is scheduled to be available in the third quarter, 3Com said.