Convergence /

NEC lets companies dive into VoIP

By Phil Hochmuth
Network World, 11/19/01

DALLAS - NEC last week introduced an enterprise telephone switch that lets businesses deploy as much or as little IP telephony as they want.

The NEAX 2000 IPS is a new version of NEC's NEAX PBX. It can connect about 500 voice users over an all-IP telephony network, a traditional circuit-switched network, or with a mixture of IP and circuit-switch connections. NEC is also introducing peer-to-peer voice-over-IP switching with the new IP PBX, which the company says can make its systems more scalable and stable.

The NEAX 2000 IPS is a PBX chassis that provides call control and business telephone features to a circuit-switched or IP-based phone network. Depending on what type of telephony a company wants to deploy, the NEAX chassis can be fitted with circuit-switched phone port cards or connected to a LAN with a 10/100 Ethernet module. The switch can also support a mixed traditional/IP telephone environment.

NEC's all-circuit-switched NEAX 2000 IVS PBX, introduced in 1994, can be upgraded to a IPS system by adding the LAN-based IP module and a software upgrade.

The NEAX 2000 IPS uses IP encapsulation of NEC's proprietary Common Channel Interoffice Signaling PBX voice protocol to send voice traffic over a data network while providing the 700-plus features available in NEC's PBX software.

The IP PBX also uses the H.245 protocol, an International Telecommunications Union standard for call setup and termination, which also lets IP phones and IP-enabled digital phones communicate in a peer-to-peer fashion over a LAN or WAN. NEC says the peer-to-peer telephony eases the call processing burden on a PBX, letting it support more phone ports with less processing power.

According to a Phillips Group survey of 500 U.S. companies, 17% of businesses have begun to implement IP telephony in their networks in the past year. Eighty percent of the survey respondents said they would have some IP telephony deployed in four years.

"Now [NEC] is really enabling the station side, and taking advantage of some benefits of having IP there," says Phillips analyst Frank Stinson. Such advantages could include distributed, IP-based call centers or IP-based software that mix enterprise applications with telephony.

While NEC is the third biggest seller of PBXs behind Nortel and Avaya, until now the firm has had only small-office IP PBX offerings, and limited "IP-enabling" products for its larger PBXs, which allowed for IP trunking of voice traffic over an IP WAN. NEC's new IP phone switch will compete with Avaya's and Nortel's IP-enabled PBX offerings, voice-over-IP products from Cisco and Alcatel's OmniPCX.

The NEAX 2000 IPS is available now at an average price of $490 per IP port. An upgrade kit for circuit-switched NEAX 2000 PBXs costs $800.