With the softswitch offering, VoIP industry had heavily focused on IP-PSTN call flow. Not many were focused on call management within the IP cloud. NexTone was one of the first companies that looked at this problem. That is one area where NexTone was the innovator and a thought leader. The company pioneered the Session Management terminology in the industry.
Operators used to convert VoIP back to TDM and handoff to another VoIP operator who would then re-convert it back to VoIP. As such back-to-back gateways were being used. NexTone decided to simulate those two back to back gateways in software. So that was the genesis of SBC.
Those developments took place around 2001. There was nobody else working on the problem at the time. NexTone spent a huge amount of marketing dollars and energy along with Acme Packet and others on the education they had to provide to the industry on the significance of SBC as an essential component. Now the industry realizes that SBC is an important standalone product.
Going back to the discussion related to NexTone’s contribution, while working on removing the back-to-back gateways, NexTone stumbled upon the interoperability problems. VoIP carriers were (and still are) using different protocols/gateways or two different versions of the same protocol. NexTone was the first one to provide SIP-to-H.323 interworking.
NexTone has also been a pioneer in distributed SBC architecture, using off-the-shelf hardware for SBC, and adding intelligence at the edge. If we take NexTone out of the picture, we would not have seen so much drive in the industry to enhance intelligence at the edge. In absence of NexTone we would likely have seen a lot dumber looking SBCs at the edge of the network.
A detailed discussion of NexTone’s contribution appears in the forthcoming paper. I will however conclude here by adding that SBC has had a bigger influence in carrier-to-carrier VoIP peering than carrier-to-consumer/enterprise peering (see the upcoming paper), and in the carrier-to-carrier VoIP peering space NexTone has contributed much more than the other SBC vendors.
Comments (1)
The 10th company that helped establish VoIP would have to be the company that created a product which allows entities deploying VoIP in their networks to migrate to VoIP in so they can leverage the investment in their existing infrastructure while deploying newer IP-based communications networks.
Quintum's Tenor VoIP switches and gateways were designed with such an architecture, and have allowed enterprises and service providers to deploy VoIP across legacy and next-gen networks. Tenors provide connectivity to the PSTN in the event that the IP networks fail, thus assuring survivability for telephony communication.
Posted by Joanne Lowy | August 7, 2007 2:26 PM
Posted on August 7, 2007 14:26