September 1998

DGM&S Telecom
1025 Briggs Rd, Ste 100
Mount Laurel, NJ 08054
Ph: 888-295-OMNI
Fx: 609-866-8850
Web site: www.dgms.com
E-mail: [email protected]

Call control can be as simple as managing your voice mail from your PC. To carriers, however, call control is a little more complex. To them, it means connecting millions of subscribers and processing billions of transactions. One way to handle the call control on a carrier scale is with DGM&S Telecom’s SignalWare — a telecommunications service application platform that runs on top of Unix and Windows NT. SignalWare goes to the core of the global SS7 network, and enables Intelligent Network (IN) applications for voice, data, and mobility communications services such as Internet call routing, local number portability, and cellular roaming. With that large of a task, it’s no wonder DGM&S bills their product as the "ultimate call control." The company recently expanded on their flagship product to produce EDGE SignalWare, which moves the call control power to a client/server environment. EDGE provides high-performance, fault-resilient, secure client/server access to SS7 networks, and enables developers to shorten time to market on telephony services.

The two components of EDGE SignalWare include the EDGE Server and a Client API library. The TCP/IP- based client/server architecture of EDGE SignalWare allows unlimited worldwide separation of the EDGE client applications from the EDGE Server component that controls the interface to the SS7 network.

EDGE SignalWare Server
The face of the telecom industry is rapidly changing. As telephony services and devices move out of the domain of the traditional telco to service bureaus and other competitors, there is an increasing need for controlled or mediated access to the signaling network. Add in convergence of voice and data networks, and there is also a need for reliable, high-performance management of the boundary between the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and wide area networks (WANs) to maximize efficiencies and minimize congestion. By providing the SS7 protocols to directly and securely control the PSTN, EDGE SignalWare accomplishes this integration.

The EDGE Server may be deployed in simplex or duplex (fault-resilient) mode. The reasons for deploying duplex servers are obvious — in mission critical applications, the duplication hardware and software means no single point of failure exists. The systems share the load when operating normally (for minimum response time and maximum throughput), but either member of a duplexed server can take over the entire function if a failure does occur.

EDGE SignalWare Client
At the core of the EDGE Client component is a Client API library, which is constructed to provide the various protocols and telephony services of EDGE in a more accessible package. Full documentation, including tutorials and code samples for each EDGE Client API function, is provided. Client API libraries support ANSI C, C++, and Java software environments. Applications and services created using the EDGE SignalWare Client API are easily portable, too.

EDGE SignalWare can operate in multiple signaling networks simultaneously, allowing for the creation of services that are deployed simultaneously in multiple network environments — an important trait for a global solution. It also supports services that bridge multiple networks, and services that perform protocol conversion services

CERFtone

TCG CERFnet
P.O. Box 919014
San Diego, CA 92191-9014
Ph: 619-812-5000;
Fx: 619-812-3990
Web site: www.cerf.net

We had selected CERFtone for an Editors’ Choice award a few days before a huge announcement — AT&T completed its merger with CERFtone’s parent company, Teleport Communications Group (TCG). The all-stock transaction was valued at $11 billion.

CERFtone’s converged solution is simple, but unique: Use business lines or trunks to combine local, intraLATA toll, long-distance, and toll-free service for the most effective rates possible. Lower customer rates even more with flat-rate, high-speed Internet services. The savings come through a converged billing paradigm that plays off of the bundled services. When customers choose TCG (a top provider of competitive communications services in its own right, with more than 10,000 miles of fiber optic cable and 50 local switches across the country) basic voice service with CERFtone, they’re saving 10 to 20 percent off their total costs. Internet service, through TCG CERFnet, is discounted 10 to 30 percent. Now it becomes clear why a merger with AT&T makes this product even more valuable — those long-distance rates come down, too.

Developed for businesses and branch offices with 100 employees or less, CERFtone allows users to combine their inbound and outbound voice traffic, along with high-speed Internet access over a common T1 connection. The bundled services make sense for organizations that need high-quality voice capabilities and fast access to the Internet, but haven’t been able to justify the cost of dedicated T1 lines for Internet access alone.

Best of all, CERFtone is a turnkey system. It includes the hardware, the access, and the service. Mark Evans, a TCG CERFnet senior product manager, reinforces the selling point that "there’s no capital impact, because the hardware is part of the cost of the service." TCG CERFnet installs a CERFtone hub device at the customer’s premises. The device is an advanced multi-service access multiplexer that provides high-speed connectivity between the customer’s offices, TCG, and TCG CERFnet. Voice traffic is sent through TCG’s voice telephony switch, and Internet traffic is sent through TCG CERFnet’s backbone router to the public Internet.

CERFtone is available in three speeds, with each version’s number mapping to its Kbps-dedicated TCG CERFnet Internet connection speed — CERFtone 128, CERFtone 256, and CERFtone 384. All of the versions support 6 to 16 analog or digital voice channels. Prices for the new CERFtone services vary, starting at about $1,175, depending upon the configuration of the voice and Internet channels and geographic location. CERFtone is just getting started, but Scott Murphy, who is involved with product management at TCG, puts the number of installations at about 1,200 between this past August and the end of this year.

Enhanced Application Platform

PulsePoint Communications
6307 Carpinteria Ave
Carpinteria, CA 93013
Ph: 805-566-2000;
Fx: 805-684-2848
Web site: www.plpt.com
E-mail: [email protected]

"Carrier-class" is the CTI buzzword du jour. The problem with buzzwords is they’re often flung about inappropriately, just for effect. PulsePoint’s Enhanced Application Platform, released earlier this year, doesn’t fall into this trap — when they say carrier-class, they back it up with a product appropriate for a range of service providers. The Enhanced Application Platform is an enhanced services platform targeted to CLECs, ISPs, and other wireline and wireless carriers that is both circuit-switched and Internet-ready. As a result, it can handle circuit-switched voice and fax traffic like a traditional enhanced services platform, session-based e-mail like an Internet electronic messaging platform, or all three (voice, fax, and e-mail) as an enhanced application platform.

The Enhanced Application Platform is the foundation of a family of PulsePoint products enabling network carriers to offer a wide range of communication-management and messaging services to end users. The company has embraced open, third-party technology from major industry players to ensure long-term cost of ownership advantages:

• Microsoft’s Windows NT Server operating system, Cluster Server (MSCS), and Internet Information Server (IIS).
• Dialogic’s DM3 Quad Voice Span technology.
• Versant’s object-oriented database (which enables the development of highly-configurable applications).
• Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Dialogic tools, integrated with PulsePoint’s proprietary Rapid Application Creation Environment (RACE), which speed development of highly-configurable Internet- and telephony-based applications.

These open technologies provide the fastest application creation environment possible, and that speed allows service providers to be competitive by offering differentiated services to their customers.

PulsePoint’s Communication-Management Suite of Applications was release concurrently with the Enhanced Application Platform, and is the first of a modular set of applications based on Microsoft’s Windows NT Server operating system. The modular applications mean PulsePoint’s solution can be customized at every level: Marketing managers can customize service offerings for specific market segments; network managers can customize the administration screens to make the system easy to understand and control; and customers have the power to customize prompts, mailbox configurations, and more.

We mentioned before that the Enhanced Application Platform is the foundation of PulsePoint’s enhanced services product line, and that new features are continuously being added. Most recently, PulsePoint licensed Lernout & Hauspie’s software technology for its Communication-Management Suite of Applications, and any third-party application that resides on the platform. L&H’s carrier-grade text-to-speech synthesizer allows subscribers to access text-based content when connected to a PulsePoint system from any phone. Continuing developments such as these, plus customers such as GTE Internetworking (a unit of GTE Corp.) and NEXTLINK Communications, make PulsePoint a company to watch.