April 2000

BY MARC ROBINS

A case in point is a new San Jose-based start-up called empowerTel Networks. empowerTel was created by the founders of Lara Technology, a developer of high-performance VoIP switching systems and silicon-based search engine technology for networking and telecommunications applications. empowerTel started off as a division of Lara and was recently spun off to run solo. Smart move -- as empowerTel is off to a running start.

As a base for its current operations, empowerTel has incorporated Lara's existing VoIP systems business division and extremely innovative technology, which I'll get into shortly. And to add mucho grease to the wheels, empowerTel recently closed on a round of financing totaling $54 million, led by Goldman Sachs and a "who's who" list of big name investment firms including Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Venture Partners, the venture capital affiliate of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Private Equity; Sony Corporation; Chase Capital Partners/Access Technology Partners, L.P.; D.B. Alex Brown; Anschutz Investment Company; and Sandler Capital. In addition, this funding includes participation by previous investors Battery Ventures, InveStar Capital, and TeleSoft Venture Partners. According to Raj Saksena, empowerTe's vice president of business development, the company actually had to turn away money -- they attracted over $130 million.

Founding Principals
empowerTel has set a high bar for itself, looking to compete with the biggest and baddest of the communications equipment companies offering next-generation systems (a.k.a. Nortel Networks, Lucent, Siemens, 3Com, Cisco, etc.). empowerTel is boldly setting out where others are also venturing -- that is, to offer carrier-grade IP-based switching systems that serve to unify the PSTN and ATM/IP-based networks, and help service providers deploy new IP-based enhanced services in rapid-fire fashion. From my discussions with empowerTel executives, it's clear that although their story isn't unique, their grasp of the market requirements, the technical and deployment challenges that confront service providers, and the solutions that will meet these requirements is refreshingly dead-on. In short, these guys tell a very, very good story. And as I already said, it doesn't hurt to have some very cool technology.

The crux of the empowerTel story is that although IP has become the dominant and ubiquitous services protocol, the PSTN is not going away. In order for service providers to deploy new, IP-based enhanced services, they need to adopt technology that provides for transparent interoperability between the old and the new. Service providers are demanding solutions that offer similar quality of service (QoS) to the PSTN, including high-quality voice and real-time customer care, seamless integration of intelligent network services (i.e., SS7), as well as the effective integration of enhanced services into their existing billing and OSS infrastructures. Subscribers want to suffer no impact on the QoS, and yet benefit from transparent integration of new services into their service plan and a single bill -- all the while enjoying the highest level of customer service and lower costs.

The successful deployment of IP telephony involves a number of technical challenges that first must be overcome. These include dealing with issues involving latency, QoS, effective interoperability of existing subscriber services with new broadband client services, and effective monitoring and measuring of network conditions. Then there are the deployment-specific issues, such as service assurance, OSS integration, the ability to maintain high network efficiency, and reliability. empowerTel has responded to each of these issues, and has engineered an elegant and highly innovative solution. As it turns out, this story has substance.

The Empowertel USX1000
empowerTel Networks' flagship product is the Unified Services Exchange (USX1000), a complete carrier-grade VoIP switching system introduced in September, 1999 that promises to deliver PSTN-quality voice convergence over IP networks, providing the high-quality, low-latency voice transport for IP networks that is critical to achieving interoperability with the existing PSTN infrastructure. Designed to scale for next-generation service providers, CLECs, RBOCs, ISPs, and cable operators, the USX1000 enables transparent migration of voice traffic to the existing IP infrastructure, allowing service providers to retain existing data and telecommunications investments. The USX1000 is designed to fill a lot of shoes: It is positioned as a means to offload legacy class 5/4 switches, support PRI bypass over an IP network for ISP interconnection, serve as an IP enhanced services platform with intelligent networking for SS7 SCP, and behave as a carrier toll/transit and multi-service broadband switch with support for xDSL and cable telephony.

The USX1000 provides full support for voice, video, data, and fax services, and is engineered as a highly scalable multi-node VoIP switch that combines empowerTel's Unified Call Exchange (UCX) and Unified Services Gateway (USG) modules. One of the USX1000's most powerful features is its ability to enable voice convergence over IP networks without losing the benefits of the existing Intelligent Network (IN). Central to empowerTel's proposition is its patent-pending MediaExpress technology -- a high-quality, low latency, silicon-based voice transport for IP networks (see below).

The Unified Call Exchange (UCX) is a high-availability, fault-tolerant "softswitch" and signaling gateway (think gatekeeper) designed to support the MGCP/MEGACO protocols that integrate SS7 signaling with an enhanced call processing framework incorporating H.323 interoperability. Appearing as a router to an IP network, the UCX offers customers the security of transitioning from their legacy service providers without compromising voice quality and interoperability with traditional telephony services and networks.

The USG, or Unified Services Gateway module, was designed to support carrier-grade call traffic -- according to empowerTel, a single USG chassis can support up to 32,256 ports per standard seven-foot telco rack, and more than one million ports per system. Other key features include support for the MGCP protocol; non-blocking layer 3 switching; IP/ATM, IP/frame, and IP/SONET WAN interfaces; and Octal DS1/E1, single DS3/E3, and quad PRI PSTN interfaces.

The third piece of empowerTel's total solution is an adjunct enhanced services platform called the Unified Application Server (UAS). The UAS employs an internal switch that is 100 percent based on IP, since it uses empowerTel's MediaExpress cards in the interconnect instead of a standard T1 card. Key features of the UAS include support for TAPI, JTAPI, and S.100 APIs, and since the distributed modular architecture of the USX1000 is based on an industry standard cPCI/H.110 chassis, the system allows for rapid integration with best-in-class, third-party CTI solutions including unified messaging, network ACD, IP Centrex, and IVR.

MediaExpress -- The Heart And Soul Of The USX1000
Interoperability with traditional telephony services and networks is perhaps the primary concern for a successful convergence strategy, and voice communications are still the most important service that needs to be offered by next-generation service providers. The TDM (PSTN) network transports voice in uncompressed (G.711) 125 msec samples on a circuit-switched network, effectively providing an end-to-end latency that is close to wire-speed.

Transporting RTP packets with small samples of a single PCM voice (uncompressed G.711) channel can be very inefficient and expensive due to the overhead imposed by the RTP/IP header in each voice packet. In order to improve efficiency, VoIP solutions are incorporating larger samples of a PCM channel, applying complex compression algorithms, all at the cost of increased latency. It seems that the IP protocol itself is to blame for this situation.

Since voice communications on average have about 35 percent silence, additional efficiency can be attained in transporting voice over packet through Voice Activity Detection (VAD). An alternative method to improve efficiency without introducing latency is through multiplexing small PCM samples from multiple users into a single RTP packet. empowerTel's MediaExpress technology employs a highly optimized multiplexing scheme while minimizing latency to thresholds that enable complete PSTN interoperability.

MediaExpress, the technology originally developed by Lara Technologies, is the primary enabler of the Unified Services Gateway's Open Modular Architecture, and the cornerstone to empowerTel's plan to provide PSTN voice quality over IP networks. MediaExpress is the result of empowerTel's MediaExpress Processor (MxP) System on a Chip (SOC). At the heart of the MxP is a highly optimized flow engine dedicated entirely to the processing of RTP packets and bridging VoIP with TDM trunks. MediaExpress was designed primarily with PSTN interoperability in mind, by providing the highest quality voice achievable on a packet network. Header processing in TDM to packet and packet to TDM conversion requires substantial compute resources and introduces tremendous overhead in VoIP processing and network efficiency. MediaExpress optimizes network efficiency in voice transport over an IP network, but also further reduces RTP/IP header processing to effectively wire speed.

MediaExpress is fully compliant with multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) specifications, and enables routing voice over multiplexed IP trunks controlled through label switched paths. The technology enables extremely low sampling periods, without any lossy compression or algorithmic delays, providing the lowest latency possible in the IP network transport, while still maintaining the most efficient use of network bandwidth. MediaExpress provides not only PSTN quality voice, but can actually be extended to provide real-time, interactive, CD-quality voice. This offers a unique opportunity for next-gen telcos to sell better quality for more bandwidth to their broadband customers. Furthermore, MediaExpress maintains the same routing overheads as provided by strategies incorporating voice compression.

Trials of empowerTel's USX1000 are in the works, and a number of carriers have shown intense interest in the product. I for one will be keeping an eye on this up and comer. c

Marc Robins is Vice President of Publications, Associate Group Publisher, and Group Editorial Director. His column, Mind Share, appears monthly in the pages of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine. Marc looks forward to your feedback.