One More Reason to Vacation in the Bahamas

By Rich Tehrani 
Recently the Bahamas Telecom Company (BTC) decided to migrate its existing countrywide wireline network to IP using Sonus and Calix gear. The move to IP will reduce the amount of equipment that needs managing and, in addition, the Bahamian phone company expects to save over one million dollars a year in electricity as a result of this switch. Another million or more is expected to be saved in reduced upgrade and maintenance costs.

In addition to replacing the existing infrastructure, the plan includes a disaster recovery site in Miami which will enable the carrier to quickly recover the island’s communications network in case of a natural disaster or other emergency.

What is interesting about this news is that Hassan Ahmed, CEO and chairman at Sonus Networks mentioned that the Bahamas is ahead of many major carriers in its adoption of IP-based telephony. While most of us in the telecom field know this to be true, it is still baffling to me. But more about this in a moment.

The components to be implemented include the Sonus Insight Element Management System (EMS), Sonus PSX, Sonus GSX9000 media gateway and Network Border Switch, the Sonus ASX Class 5 feature server and Sonus SGX. This advanced IP-based network also includes the integration of access solutions from Calix, including the Calix C7 Multiservice Access Platform (MSAP).

I visited Sonus’ Massachusetts headquarters to learn more and during a meeting there I spoke with CTO Vikram Saksena , who told me they won the contract because of their ability to scale and provide everything the customer was looking for. This includes Class 4 and 5 services, as well as business and consumer applications. Part of this solution also includes session border control equipment having advanced capabilities such as transcoding.

When asked about the future of communications, Sakesena told me that applications and services are next. Having espoused this concept to my readers for well over a decade, I asked for details. He replied that we’ll be seeing a lot of voice messaging integration and Internet integration: social networking and IM. He said we’ll be seeing more mobile video and Web 2.0 apps.

I also asked about avatars as I have written about these several times recently (www.tmcnet.com/2090.1). Saksena responded that they’ve seen avatar product trials but nothing mainstream yet. He also said there’s a trend towards personalization and intelligent assistants — this was a point he emphasized. I agree, but I’ve been writing about these things since Avid’s Wildfire in the mid-1990s — and I wonder what the wait is all about. Then again, I talked about unified messaging back then as well — and that has become part of unified communications over a decade later.

Sonus’ future is to move up the application layer and the IMX 2.0 Multimedia Application Platform is a big part of this strategy. Think of the IMX as the ultra-flexible application environment you need to build next-gen communications services.

The platform comes with a bunch of prototype applications and — surprise — one of them is a Multimedia Digital Avatar. Others include something called Any-To-Any Messaging Server, a service which enables you to instantly contact others regardless of how they want to be reached: IM, email, TTS — it really doesn’t matter. During a demo, I saw an IM flash on a TV screen — interrupting the programming. Subscribers can set their preference to “do not disturb” unless the subject was of interest such as poker, shopping, etc.

Sonus has built several reference applications such as Video Session Transfer, Intelligent IP Video Integration, Interactive Advertising, Click-To-Dial, Call Blast, and FMC but perhaps my favorite has to be parental controls. (If you have kids, you know what I’m talking about.)

In conclusion, it seems ridiculous that more carriers aren’t deploying all these applications. There is so much potential for service providers to provide new services such as the ones I saw in the Sonus labs.

When will larger, more mainstream carriers start to deploy some of these intriguing services? Perhaps the day some telecom executives travel and see firsthand that a small group of islands near the equator is way ahead of them, generating tremendous revenue while saving money on system maintenance and electricity.

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