Aculab’s (News - Alert) GroomerII is offered as a cost-effective, signalling and media gateway for any telco or service provider function where there is a need for IP and TDM voice network interconnectivity. With its impressive pedigree, GroomerII is a reliable, compliance tested gateway solution that can be used to add new voice services, extend existing infrastructure, and reduce costs in support of a migration strategy to an all IP architecture. It enables the delivery of today's revenue generating, IP-based services into SS7 or legacy CAS and PRI networks.

The call routing capability of GroomerII is a feature that underlines its adaptability, enabling the resolution of many problem scenarios. The integral call manager offers innumerable routing options and an ODBC database interface further extends its capability for routing on selected parameters. Routing can be based on various factors such as CLI or DDI (ANI/DNIS) numbers, SIP Proxy, IP address, TDM numbering plans, and black/white lists. Fallback routing, number translation and number portability are also offered as is call concentration from multiple trunks. When connected to a hosted IP service platform, such as an array of IVR gateway servers, GroomerII also provides outgoing SIP call balancing.

Features such as these have been introduced to help many users overcome operational dilemmas and are what makes GroomerII a powerful and adaptable problem solver.

A recent addition to GroomerII’s feature set is the ability to specify wildcards for discrete routing of calls to IP-based applications.

 

In a scenario where a service provider has several SIP applications, each running on separate hosts, there is a need to be able to route incoming calls to a specific application. As these calls originate in the PSTN, they will be DDI (DNIS) calls within a range of DDI numbers destined for a given application. That is, calls with a specific prefix to the DDI number should terminate at the appropriate application.

For example, all calls with a DDI starting with 84322 should be routed to the SIP application on the host at IP address 192.168.1.20 and calls with a DDI beginning with 84323 should be routed to the application on host 192.168.1.21 ensuring that all calls arrive at the correct SIP end point. This is achieved by configuring wildcard characters in GroomerII’s internal routing tables so that the address map for each SIP end point translates a range of DDI numbers (e.g., 8432200000-8432299999) into the required IP address.

Many service providers are today taking advantage of the benefits of IP to offer a variety of customer care and revenue generating services via applications running on SIP-based platforms. As most all TEMs and platform vendors are offering IP-based service delivery platforms instead of legacy TDM systems these days, there isn’t an alternative, even if they wanted one. However, despite the popularity of Skype and Asterisk (News - Alert) and ever increasing mobile penetration, it is still the case that PSTN subscribers vastly outnumber VoIP and IP telephony users.

Therefore, as service providers continue to publish DDI numbers, in order for their valuable PSTN subscribers to access the variety of services hosted on their IP-based platforms, they have an abiding need for adaptable and configurable gateways. One such gateway is Aculab’s GroomerII – the ‘Swiss Army knife’ of gateways helping to solve yet another problem.