April 1999

Carving A Niche In The Global Network

BY HANAVI HIRSH

The wave of new IP-based voice and fax technology is creating opportunities for service providers of all sizes. IPUniversal (www.ipuniversal.com), established in 1997 and headquartered in Newport Beach, CA, has joined the growing number of businesses that have jumped into the fray. By carefully choosing its markets and technology, this small company with large ambitions has prepared itself to succeed in a global market where new competitors emerge every month.

IPUniversal has set out to establish the global IPUniversal Network by working with agents in other countries - generally, established businesses offering Internet access services to their subscribers. A local agent will invest in the turnkey system manufactured by Voice & Data Systems (VDS) of Montreal, Canada (www.voiceanddatasystems.com), that will form the bridge between the local PSTN and the Internet, thus becoming an IPUniversal "node owner." The node owner will have the technical skills to maintain and troubleshoot the VDS systems, which are based on industry-standard components housed in a telco-grade industrial chassis.

It is up to the local agent to promote and sell the services to target markets, which typically include both small businesses and individuals who have relatives and colleagues overseas. All retail billing is done locally.

A SERVICE FOR PROVIDERS
IPUniversal operates the "master node" in California, which will deliver traffic that originates overseas across the PSTN to points in the United States and Canada. The prices that IPUniversal can negotiate in the highly competitive North American telecommunications market enable the company to charge attractive wholesale rates to the various node owners. The expensive portion - the incoming international leg from countries that may still have high-priced national service providers in a monopoly position - has been eliminated, as the Internet is used for all communications between nodes in the IPUniversal Network.

For international calling, IPUniversal's master node in California gathers domestic traffic and directs it to the appropriate overseas nodes. NOBI (Node Owner Billing Interface) software developed by IPUniversal is included in the turnkey system that is delivered to the local agents, and handles the billing of local subscribers. At the wholesale level, other IPUniversal software modules look after settlement issues between IPUniversal and the other nodes in the network. If a transmission does not involve the California node, the settlement will be made between the two local nodes.

IPUniversal is currently offering a full range of fax services as well as voice messaging. The principle direction for fax is inbound to the United States, and it is in this direction that the most attractive cost savings can be realized. A subscriber in Bangladesh, for instance, can send a fax to the United States for 40 percent of the local PSTN rate.

PLACING THE CALL
An autodialer at the subscriber site will dial the local node where a VDS FaxPAD is installed, and the destination fax number is then entered. If a connection can be made, the delivery is made in real time, and the process is transparent to the user. The same progress tones are heard, but the user does not know that those tones - including the second dial tone, ringing, or a busy signal if the line of the receiving fax is in use - are actually produced at the local node by the VDS FaxPAD as the FaxPAD interprets the data signals that are sent across the Internet by the receiving FaxPAD. A successful transmission will lead to a normal confirmation slip at the sending machine, with that confirmation originating from the remote fax machine. No false confirmations are possible. A busy signal will switch the FaxPAD into store-and-forward mode to enable automatic retries if that feature has been chosen by the subscriber. Other options include future delivery and fax broadcast.

Another type of service channels traffic flowing in the other direction - outbound from the United States. The fax/voice-to-e-mail service enables someone in an overseas location to establish a low-cost Point of Presence (POP) in any country where there is an IPUniversal node. The subscriber is given a U.S. telephone number at which both voice and fax messages can be received, and the messages are sent to the subscriber's e-mail address as .TIFF and .WAV file attachments to an ordinary e-mail message. This service is sold for a monthly charge by local agents to their customers. Since those agents are ISPs, fax/voice-to-e-mail is an attractive value-added service to sell to a subscriber base.

The calls received at an IPUniversal node come in on either analog lines or T1/E1, depending on the size of the node. Fax calls are routed along the MVIP bus to Brooktrout TR114 intelligent fax processing cards (www.brooktrout.com). The real-time FaxPAD functionality developed by Brooktrout in close collaboration with Voice & Data Systems was the first implementation of the ITU (www.itu.org) X.38 and X.39 recommendations for fax transmission across packetized data networks. To build fax processing systems that will work reliably in almost every country in the world takes many years of work. When IPUniversal proposed to implement the VDS technology in locations that include places with very problematic telecommunications infrastructures, the VDS engineers already had gained experience in FaxPAD installations in 25 countries.

The Brooktrout cards had proven themselves capable of handling the loop-start lines, which had varying properties from country to country, and could reliably communicate with fax machines from many different manufacturers. The VDS engineers had written special drivers for the Brooktrout cards so that they would work with the high-performance QNX real-time operating system, which provides the overall stability and efficiency of the software architecture.

Now that IPUniversal's network is in place, the company must rely on the needs of its resellers - service providers around the globe - to expand its enterprise. Based on the growing demand for cost-efficient global communications solutions, the company has carved out a stellar opportunity.

Hanavi Hirsh is a marketing consultant for Voice & Data Systems (VDS). VDS has built on years of experience pioneering true real-time fax over X.25 data networks to become the world's leading vendor of PSTN-quality Internet fax solutions. Worldwide, in over 25 countries, carriers and service providers have teamed up with VDS to deliver PSTN-quality international real-time fax transmission services over packet switched wide area networks. For additional information, contact Marie Cloutier, marketing director for VDS, at [email protected], or visit the company's Web site at www.voiceanddatasystems.com.