Nortel voices IP strategy

By David Rohde
Network World Fusion, 6/30/98

Northern Telecom, Inc. Tuesday unveiled its long-awaited voice-over-IP strategy, emphasizing scalability and enhanced service features.

Nortel's new IPConnect family is a set of gateways and call servers that traditional carriers, ISPs and emerging new carriers can use to offer IP dialing services that emulate ordinary telephony.

The key to the IPConnect line is a distinction between gateways optimized for Internet-oriented carriers and those designed for traditional carriers worried about their heavy investment in circuit switching.

For ISPs and Internet telephony carriers, Nortel is offering two IPConnect products. The first, i-Tone Gateway, is a typical 24- to 96-port small carrier box that converts public telephone traffic flows to IP packets. The second, the CVX 1800 Gateway, is a voice-enabled upgrade of an existing ISP-class remote access server, the 672-port CVX 1800 from Nortel subsidiary Aptis Communications, Inc.

For traditional local and long-distance carriers, Nortel is offering two larger options involving plug-in cards and software for older circuit-switching gear.

The MMCS Gateway is designed especially for an emerging class of service called IP Centrex, the packet-switching equivalent of the traditional telephony local service that eliminates the need for a PBX on a customer's premise. The MMCS Gateway scales to 1,800 ports.

Finally, the DMS IP Gateway re-configures Nortel's flagship central office switch, the DMS-100, for IP telephony and supports potentially up to 100,000 ports.

All four products come with software called the IPConnect Gatekeeper that can be integrated into the gateway or installed on a separate call server in the carrier network. The Gatekeeper offers a set of enhancements that eliminate some of the awkward procedures users often suffer when using Internet telephony. For example, combined with IP trunks now available on some PBXs such as Nortel's own Meridian 1, end users can purchase dedicated access lines into their carriers that are using IPConnect and avoid the extra dialing digits now usually need to reach IP telephony carriers.

IPConnect's debut comes following Nortel's announcement of its acquisition of Bay Networks, Inc. and as the Nortel/Bay combo's two major rivals -- Cisco Systems, Inc. and Lucent Technologies, Inc. -- have both roared into the IP multimedia market.

Until now, Nortel's IP carrier options have largely revolved around IP-to-telephone-network conversion gear that sits in front of a traditional carrier switch such as a DMS-100 and has garnered little interest among IP-oriented carriers. "For those types of carriers, they don't have any DMS-100s and they have no interest in buying any," conceded Al Bender, Nortel's general manager of voice-over-IP solutions. And specifically for voice and multimedia, Nortel has emphasized ATM and frame relay switches that are popular among traditional carriers but not ISPs and start-ups.

Now Nortel officials said they have changed their approach to offer a range of voice-switching gear suitable to different carrier environments. In fact, the ISP-oriented i-Tone gateway is likely to be the first of the new products to come to market, with tests now under way in some carrier networks. The other gateways will probably not get a test run until the fourth quarter of 1998, with commercial availability slated for early next year. Prices will range from $400 to $700 per port.