Scalability is the bane of Internet telephony gateway vendors everywhere. I have heard countless stories of service providers trialing gateways only to find that the gateways don't scale as well as the vendor promised -- often the board vendors are to blame. Every board-level Internet telephony vendor I have ever spoken with tells me that they have the best scalability, and that their competitors can't scale. At so many trade shows I hear "Sure they have a great marketing machine, but try to make more than 10 calls on a gateway that contains their boards without bringing the CPU to its knees." Who knows what to believe anymore, with so much competition and mud flying everywhere.

So when Lucent calls me and tells me that their new PacketStar IP product line can scale to 3,360 simultaneous DS0s per rack, I put down my work, put up the "Do Not Disturb" sign on my cubicle and ask for details. Ladies and gentleman, I have oodles of details that I would love to share with all of you -- just keep reading, there is a lot of meat in this article. Coming from Lucent, you can trust that these products will work as promised. As with all products in the technology industry, take projected product release dates with a grain of salt (or two).

Pinning Down Numbers
Lucent claims that a staggering two million Internet telephony and Internet fax calls a day can be transmitted with their newly-announced PacketStar IP Gateway 1000, PacketStar IP Gatekeeper, and PacketStar IP Manager. In fact, the PacketStar IP product line is intended to provide service providers a platform on which to build robust differentiated voice and fax services over IP networks. Indeed, these are the very enhanced services that make IP telephony so attractive -- why should a service provider be limited to just selling voice when new and very profitable enhanced services can be added almost seamlessly through software?

Any service provider is a candidate for the PacketStar system -- CLECs, ISPs, next-generation telcos, prepaid calling card vendors, IXCs, PTTs, and other network providers looking to transmit voice and/or fax over an IP network all benefit. The specs are pretty impressive:

• Fault tolerance and NEBS Level III compliance.
• Dynamic voice and fax allocation on any port.
• Internal ATM switching fabric.
• 28 T1s per gateway (672 DS0s).
• 5 gateways fit in a seven-foot rack totaling 3,360 DS0s per rack (ouch!).
• Low latency (80 milliseconds end-to-end).
• Support for G.729a and G.711 codecs.
• elemedia H.323 software and gatekeeper development toolkit.
• Compliance with H.323 version 2.0.

Lucent has made a firm commitment to interoperability with the PacketStar. ITXC recently announced that Ascend, Cisco, Clarent, Dialogic, Natural MicroSystems, Lucent, and Siemens will integrate support for the iNOW! (interoperability NOW!) profile into their respective Internet telephony platforms. The profile, which is based on H.323 protocols and the H.225.0 Annex G, will detail how to achieve interoperability between gateways and gatekeepers from different vendors. As I wrote in my Publishers Outlook in the February 1998 INTERNET TELEPHONY, Lucent and VocalTec co-developed the interoperability profile, with ITXC providing lab and field testing, project management, and marketing. The iNOW! profile is scheduled to be released as you read this. For more information, contact Lucent, VocalTec, or ITXC.

Enhancements Planned
In the future, we can expect The PacketStar system to support the Signaling System 7 (SS7) protocol, enabling network integration and feature transparency -- such as call forwarding, call waiting and toll-free services -- between the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and IP networks. The PacketStar IP Gateway 1000 will also provide future support for emerging IP telephony protocols, such as the Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP), and it will incorporate Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities.

Further enhancing the usefulness of this solution, a standalone gatekeeper aptly named The PacketStar IP Gatekeeper contains a centralized database -- which provides authentication, call routing, and billing support. The scalability of the gatekeeper enables service providers to build networks with support for up to 5,000 simultaneous calls and more than two million calls per day. An optional product in the family is the PacketStar IP Gatekeeper -- the Bell Labs-developed Service Ready Internet Telephony Prepay Billing Server, an account management and customer care system that allows service providers to offer prepaid billing support for up to one million subscribers per server!

Managing It All
Lucent offers software management of this new family of products through the PacketStar IP Manager that offers an easy-to-use graphical user interface to provide administrators with a centrally managed, whole network view. This enables service providers to implement operations, administration, maintenance, and provisioning functions. The browser-based graphical user interface uses color-coded icons to display and manage all the PacketStar IP Gateway 1000 and PacketStar IP Gatekeeper network elements for simplified network management.

Lucent's NetCare Data Services will provide support for service providers buying the PacketStar IP Gateway 1000 solution by offering on-site installation, maintenance, consulting, and professional services. General availability of the first release of the PacketStar IP Gateway 1000, PacketStar IP Gatekeeper, and PacketStar IP Manager is scheduled for the end of February in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, and eight European countries. A subsequent release will be available in June.

The PacketStar IP Gateway 1000 has a U.S. list price of $325 to $600 per port, depending on configuration. The PacketStar IP Gatekeeper and PacketStar IP Manager list at $150,000 and $45,000, respectively, for the turnkey software and hardware solution. Remote technical support is included with the products during the one-year warranty period. Standard volume discounts are available. To assist service providers and telcos to enter the Internet telephony business quickly and inexpensively, Newcourt Credit's/Lucent Technologies Product Finance Group is also offering a suite of financial options. For more information, please visit http://www.lucent.com/dns.

Rich Tehrani welcomes comments at rtehrani@tmcnet.com.