* IP Centrex reduces telephony costs
Proponents of IP Centrex say the services will save money reduce costs and ease complexity. Detractors will tell you IP Centrex services aren’t fully baked yet and service providers haven’t really figured out how to deliver all the features users insist upon.
The truth as usual lies somewhere in between.
Our Tech Update author this week (ttavares@xl.com) is firmly in the IP Centrex proponent camp and notes that besides relieving customers of basic management responsibilities, hosted services offer better disaster recovery options. Chiefly that’s because the service controller is off-site and telco central offices have about as many built-in safety features as you can get. What’s more, with IP Centrex, customers can wipe their hands of upgrade hassles and version control problems.
Our author says carriers can implement IP Centrex via a Class 5 switch or softswitch-based architecture. Carriers can roll out new services using existing Class 5 switches by adding network gateways. The Class 5 approach is actually an IP-enabled hybrid called Centrex IP. In the second scenario, the Class 5 switch is replaced with a softswitch. The softswitch architecture uses an application server instead of a network gateway.
If you want to read more about this story, see: https://www.nwfusion.com/news/tech/2003/1020techupdate.html
