Intermedia Communications plans to roll out IP voice and data services for multitenant buildings in 40 cities by year-end.
Business customers have tested on a trial basis Intermedia's Advanced Building Networks, which will enable service providers to bundle voice and data services, giving customers a single carrier and a single bill to deal with.
Advanced Building Networks supports flexible bandwidth up to 100M bit/sec Internet access that can be increased as customers need more. Intermedia claims its architecture will cut the time it takes to set up voice and high-speed data services.
Intermedia also plans to link its network to those of application service providers so customers can outsource their business applications. Voice services will include call-center features, such as automatic call distribution and computer telephony integration.
While Intermedia wouldn't say which vendors' gear it will be using, its network architect, Jon Heaton, outlined the key components.
Customers will be issued an IP phone that has Ethernet ports on the back for plugging in PCs. Those phones will be connected to a small 10/100 Ethernet switch in the same customer office. Each of those switches will be connected via Category 5 wiring to a larger switch in each building. Traffic from different customers will be kept separate via virtual LANs set up for each.
The larger building switches will be plugged in to routers that are connected to an Intermedia point of presence with at least a T-1 line. At the POP, data and Internet traffic will be stripped off and dropped on the Intermedia Business Internet network.
Voice will be routed to a firewalled Ethernet switch that is connected to a call processing server and a voice-over-IP gateway that converts IP voice to traditional circuit switched voice. This converted voice is passed on to a traditional voice switch owned by Intermedia, and that switch connects to the public phone network.
Initially, none of the voice calls will be delivered over an IP backbone, but the company has plans to do that later.
Heaton says Intermedia wants to first get the access part done correctly and then evolve the service one step at a time. He says Intermedia is waiting for backbone IP quality-of-service technology, such as Multi-protocol Label Switching, to be ready within the next few months.
For now Intermedia is using Differentiated Services technology to give voice priority over data, and engineering its access links so delays are short enough to maintain voice quality.
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