Cisco boosts voice product family

By Jim Duffy
Network World, 08/02/99

SAN JOSE - Cisco's new packetized telephony products are designed to let users migrate to a single integrated data, voice and video network.

Cisco last week announced five products intended to help users benefit from the reduced costs, improved network efficiency and multimedia business applications converged networks promise. The products include:

A digital T-1/E-1 High-Capacity Voice Port Adapter for Cisco 7200 and 7500 routers.
A digital T-1/E-1 Packet Voice Trunk Network Module for Cisco 2600 and 3600 routers.
The Cisco 3660 multiservice router.

One user says the new offerings, particularly the 3660, will indeed help reduce equipment costs.

"It's exactly what we've been waiting for, kind of the piece we've been missing," says Bill Homa, chief information officer at Hannaford Bros. Co. of Scarborough, Maine, which operates 150 grocery stores on the East Coast and is running voice over its ATM data network. "The issue for us has been switching voice calls. "

Until now, the company has had to install and program several Cisco MC 3810s and StrataCom BPX switches.

"The 3660 and the T-1 cards in it will eliminate all that," Homa says.

The only downside to Hannaford's plan is that the company will have to wait another month for Cisco to ship ATM modules for the 3660 so it can directly interface the ATM switches in its net, Homa says.

The 3660 is an eight-slot chassis with two fixed 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet ports. Six of the slots can be used to house network modules such as the new digital T-1/E-1 boards. The other two slots can support what Cisco calls Advanced Integration Modules for hardware acceleration and additional processing power.

Cisco's digital T-1/E-1 voice port adapter and network module products let users add higher-density voice to new and existing equipment. The products provide a range of density options: from two to 48 simultaneous voice calls on the 2600 series; two to 288 simultaneous voice calls on the 3600 series; and 48 to 720 simultaneous voice calls on the Cisco 7200/7500 series.

Cisco also announced a T-1/E-1 Multiflex Voice/WAN Interface Card (Multiflex VWIC) for Cisco 2600 and 3600 routers, and the Multimedia Conference Man-ager (MCM) H.323 Gatekeeper on Cisco 2600 and Cisco 7200 series routers.

The T-1/E-1 Multiflex VWIC card, as well as the digital T-1/E-1 adapters, support mixed environments of time-division multiplexer voice, voice over IP and voice over frame relay, Cisco says. The MCM H.323 Gatekeeper is implemented as a feature set in Cisco IOS software and provides management and quality of service for voice and video.

The Gatekeeper ensures that voice and videoconferencing connections receive priority over data traffic. The Gatekeeper also provides security for conferencing and voice-over-IP traffic, Cisco says.

The H.323 standard defines call signaling procedures and services available in desktops, servers and gateways in an IP voice infrastructure.

The new products will ship in August. The digital T-1/E-1 Voice Interfaces for the 7200/3600/2600 series range from $7,400 to $23,000. Entry-level pricing for the new 3660 Multiservice Platform is $10,700.

Pricing for T-1/E-1 Multiflex VWIC for the Cisco 2600/ 3600 series starts at $1,300.

Cisco: www.cisco.com.