BY RICH TEHRANI
Group Publisher

Circuit/Packet Chameleons:
Easing The Telecom Transition To Native IP

Those of you that have ever driven on New England roads have experienced the painful reality known as legacy technology: Specifically, the highway systems of the northeast in contrast to those of California or other states with more modern infrastructure. In Connecticut, where TMC is located, there is absolutely no on-ramp control -- cars can continually enter a highway from a single on-ramp, bringing traffic on a once free-flowing highway to an immediate volume-related stand still. California highways have advanced metering controls on their on-ramps to prevent traffic "dumping" at a particular on-ramp. Granted, no amount of metering technology has rid California of traffic, but at least this technology helps.

IP Solves Conversion Inefficiencies
Telecom's infrastructure also has myriad limitations and inefficiencies built into the network. Take a traditional telephone call between two offices. An office user picks up a phone on his digital PBX which converts analog signals to digital and subsequently transmits the signal to the Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) through an analog line. This signal is digitized by the telco and transmitted as data to the local area of the called party, where the LEC converts the data back to analog. The analog signal is fed into an auto attendant/PBX which converts it back to digital (again) until it reaches the telephone where it reverts to becomes analog once more. If the call goes into voice mail, it is digitized and stored as data in a .WAV or other audio file for playback later.

This whole system is inefficient -- there are way too many analog to digital and digital to analog conversions. Using native IP telephony will solve many of these problems inherent in our legacy telco infrastructure.

Aware that such inefficiencies must be solved, Active Voice, a leader in unified messaging, decided to get a jump on the competition by offering their unified messaging technology on an IP platform. The company recently announced that their Unity 2.0 communications server will support integration with CallManager 2.2, the latest version of the Cisco voice/data switch (IP PBX) (formerly Selsius' product).

As the world transitions from pure circuit-switched to native IP, we can consider the next decade or so to be a transition period. During this time, there will always be a need for systems to work with both analog and native IP networks. Active Voice has built support for both networks for exactly this reason.

What is really interesting is that Unity is the only unified messaging product that supports the Cisco voice/data switch entirely through software. At the same time, Active Voice will support 150+ circuit-switch integrations through voice boards. In this way, the Unity server becomes a circuit and packet chameleon.

In a recent conversation with Andy Voss of Nuera, Andy coined the memorable phrase, "It's pretty expensive to increase bandwidth when your backbone is concrete." That's certainly a sentiment I am sure to ponder every time I drive into Manhattan or anywhere near Los Angeles. Let's just be glad that solving legacy inefficiencies in telecom is a great deal easier using IP telephony technology than solving the congestion of the nation's highways using concrete.

Rich Tehrani welcomes comments at rtehrani@tmcnet.com.