Softswitch Fever: The Bedrock for Next-Gen Services - Technology Information

Telecommunications, Jan, 2000 by Doug Allen

Different types of service providers will select different softswitch models. "In our experience, a softswitch model that distributes feature control to the edge through an IAD while maintaining centralized call control is quite appropriate for greenfield CLECs that don't already have an investment in class switches," said Sally Bement, president of marketing at Convergent Networks. "In addition, for those service providers that serve the ISP market (e.g., ICPs), maintaining centralized call control is also particularly attractive as it allows for tremendous scalability." In this application, carriers can offload modem (data) traffic to a data network, sending only voice through to their class switches and out to the PSTN. "IXCs, however, are likely to want to centralize signaling and certain call control features such as 800 number translation," Bement said. "ILECs are likely to be the slowest to adopt this new model given the extent of their investment in legacy class switches." Similarly, IXCs probably onl y require a high-performance plain vanilla softswitch for large numbers of routing lookups and call setups; deluxe features are not necessary. ICPs offering broader services need a more feature-rich Class 5 replacement.

Softswitches are also a good move for providers that simply can't rationalize building out with circuit switches. Besides the cost, providers can migrate fairly easily with softswitches and can handle services that are too complex for a Class 5 switch, such as audio videoconferencing.

Second Century Communications, based in Tampa, has a reputation for aggressive deployment. It's using Convergent's Service Management Gateway and ICS switch in a multiservice interworking application that handles voice and data over its unified ATM core network, with an eye toward more advanced services such as carrier-direct wake-up calls or event alerts that give phone notification of a birthday

Give Users What They Want

Will end users program their own services on their lunch breaks? Not quite. Some services such as call forwarding are easily done via Web interfaces and present few deployment issues for the provider. Most providers, though, get extremely nervous when giving the customer "too much" control over--or even visibility into--the network. But softswitches will make the service implementation cycle much faster.

At a minimum, softswitches must support open APIs for service creation: Most vendors will also include a programming environment as well.

Obviously, this flexibility is in the future, but softswitch customers are generally optimistic the industry will get there. Elliott's vision is ambitious, but not necessarily unique: "We intend to allow end users to create their own softswitches and control their own network partitions. That will result in some truly astounding innovation. They'll dream up services we could not possibly anticipate."

If softswitches really solve all the world's telecom ills, then why hasn't every next-gen telco deployed one? Interoperability, standards and politics. "The industry has a way to go to actually get standards and definitions in place," said Probe Research's Hilary Mine. "I believe it will get increasingly messy before we see consensus on next-gen architectures. It is very political and strategic. In essence, the industry has to adopt an operating environment for future public networks. The question is: Who will be the Intels and Microsofts of the public network? Understandably, every major and minor vendor wants to be, and that is developing tremendous battlegrounds."