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Ive touched on the topic of evolution several times over
the past few months. I think its an important point to bring up in that
even with all the groundbreaking advances our industry has seen in the past
five years, the fact is as in other areas of high-tech that most
successful endeavors in the Internet telephony industry are based not on
revolutionary ideas, but on the intelligent, systemic application of
incremental changes to create exciting new technology on the solid
foundation of meaningful work that has come before. In other words:
Evolution.
One evolutionary example that weve seen played out time and again is
that of distributing computing power as processors have become more
powerful. For example, beginning in the 1980s, Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI)
led the world in three-dimensional rendering by manufacturing its own
workstations, central processors, and operating system software that were
simply far and away more powerful than any commercially available
equivalent. But, as the cost of processing power dropped, and the commercial
availability of computing platforms featuring more and more horsepower grew,
it became possible for competitors to approach the quality of
graphics-rendering that was once only possible on an SGI machine. Coupled
with the fact that hardware platforms were getting faster and cheaper,
software was increasingly available that could enable vast armies of
developers and artists to ply their craft without the need for SGI products.
Weve seen such a shift in our industry as well. Where Class 5 switches
and massive, proprietary hardware were once the norm, we are starting to see
the fruits of the first deployments of next-generation solutions where
switching, applications, transport, etc are all being distributed out to
various network elements, resulting in increased scalability and
reliability. By taking advantage of a so-called Web model, network
elements are increasingly open, standards-based, and available from an
increasing array of vendors.
Some months ago I wrote an article about media servers, and how a number
of companies were offering hardware-based solutions that work in concert
with softswitches, application servers, media gateways, and other
next-generation network elements in order to create full-fledged service
provider solutions. These vendors, such as NMS Communications, Convedia, and
others, use dedicated DSP (digital signal processing) resources to handle
media-processing-intensive applications such as IVR, messaging, calling
card, and the like. These powerful platforms are usually carrier-grade, with
huge port densities (upwards of 10,000 ports per system!), and support any
number of currently accepted communications protocols, such as SIP, H.323,
Megaco (H.248), and others.
Recently, Arlington, VA-based aTelo, Inc. (www.atelo.com),
has decided to evolve the media server to a software-based model that can
run on any computer running Windows 2000 or Unix. aTelos Media Server (aMS)
eschews the traditional hardware driven DSP-heavy approach for a
software-based solution that promises to deliver tremendous advances in
scalability, ease of development, and faster time to market, resulting in
lower capital expenditure and more profitable operation.
The aMS is designed to (among other things) open up the development
environment (once limited to designers fluent in proprietary scripting
languages) to the mass of developers familiar with such open environments as
C, Java, ASP, Perl, CGI, Visual Basic, IBM Websphere, Microsoft .NET, and
more, allowing them to create feature-rich telephony services using standard
Web development expertise. Curently, aTelo claims 120 to 125 channels per
CPU, which they hope to increase to be able to run a DS3 worth of traffic in
a 1U server. And, since the aMS runs on off-the-shelf servers, its
deployment and ongoing maintenance costs are an order of magnitude less than
any comparable hardware-based product on the market, according to the
company. Likewise, aTelo customers benefit from the ability to select their
own infrastructure on which to run the aTelo software, due to the
traditionally faster upgrade cycles of the PC industry, as compared to that
of a proprietary board vendor. Many boards take up to 18 months to design,
and by that time, its very possible to be saddled with old processors.
aTelos ability to run on the latest commercially available hardware
circumvents that problem. By doing so, aTelo is essentially attempting an
end-run around the manufacturers of proprietary computer-telephony boards.
What does this mean for our industry? The idea that we can move beyond
existing limitations in scalability is rather profound, especially from a
cost perspective. Likewise, the idea of opening up the development of
telephony applications to a huge audience of developers is compelling as
well. Still, theres a place for the proprietary-hardware-based, DSP
intensive solutions offered by the other media server players. In fact, the
folks at aTelo readily agree that for large-scale deployments, or for
applications such as n-way conferencing or transcoding, the big-iron
hardware solutions are probably a good fit. But for lower cost, ease of
development, scalability, time to market, etc the distributed model of
software running on readily available open hardware platforms appears to
offer some serious advantages. Interestingly enough, Ive heard from
several board vendors who are genuinely concerned about these developments.
The industrys big guns are worried. Theyre afraid that the
evolution to a software-based model might just leave them struggling to
catch up in a field where they once led.
What do you think? Drop me a line at rtehrani@tmcnet.com
and let me know your thoughts.
[ Return
To The April 2002 Table Of Contents ]
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The Ultimate Conference Comes To
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