A conversation with Mark Cortner of TalkingNets - Back Talk - Interview

Telecommunications, June, 2002 by Sean Buckley

Mark Cortner is vice president of marketing for TalkingNets. Prior to joining the company, he was director-of-strategic partners marketing at Winstar Communications and beld positions at TLC where be led the marketing efforts of an internal start-up team that resulted international deployment by one of the worlds largest wireless service providers Cortner bolds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tennesee and an MBA from the University of Miami

Q Please describe TalkingNets business model.

A TalkingNets is a telephony ASP building a next-gen, packet telephony network for local and enhanced voice services. We are a registered CLEC with ILEC interconnections to provide primary phone line replacement.

Q Do you mind being known as an ASP.

A Let's just say two years ago, an ASP had a little more luster. If I were to go back a year when things started to get tough, I would have said TalkingNets is hosting something every business needs--voice service. Voice would not pop into most people's minds when you think of the traditional ASP model. In essence, we are a CLEC, a telephony ASP and a dial-tone provider.

Q Can you describe the softswitch networks

A Our SIP-based network consists of A three components: applications servers, softswitches and PSTN gateways. We wanted to work with people developing single pieces of that pie because packet telephony is in early commercial deployment, so no single vendor would successfully lead the charge in every area. If you use a single vendor for all those components, there's a higher probability of integration, but these products are STP based and capable of MGCP (Media Gateway Control Protocol) signaling.

For our application server, we use Broadsoft for dial tone, hosted phone system functionality and enhanced services. Initially, we looked at Sylantro and LongBoard, but LongBoard was getting started when we began vendor selection. We use Sonus Class 5 softswitch for the translation between SIP and SS7, and a Cisco PSTN gateway converts packet to TDM

Q What made TalkiingNets settle on these vendors?

What attracted us to Sonus TTI softswitch as its compatibility with third party gateways One of the reasons Sonus bought TTI was Sonus switch only worked with Sonus gateways. You won't be surprised to find out the Cisco BTS softswitch is only compatible with the Cisco gateway. Dowb the road, vendors will likely meld softswitch and gateway into one functional component. While a softswitch gives you the switching vendors are looking for the gateway business because the real growth from a component standpoint is the gateway. In a 25-city deployment we might deploy four switches and have 25 to 75 gateways depending market scale

Q What are SIP's benefits?

A As an industry view, the question is why SIP? Well, the next-gen packet telephony infrastructure has embraced SIP as an open standard that enables multiple vendors to build individual components, creating an environment of innovation and competition. This is in stark contrast to the Class 5 world, 99 percent of which comes from either Lucent or Nortel. Once you buy the switch, applications come from Lucent so the time to market and innovation are heavily in favor of SIP. When has Nortel or Lucent made five new release in a year? If you're an app server vendor, nothing motivates you more than someone else down the street working on something similar.

Q How are local carrier agreements met and how do you account for QoS?

A To become a data partner, you understand that I, being an IP pipe provider, am now on TalkingNets' distribution channel to provide voice services. We built this ecosystem of data partners and when one of these VARs sells our VoIP services, we assure QoS by putting our voice services over a managed connection that invokes weighted fair queuing to give voice priority. Our voice services run over managed connections, with the exception of some remote user applications that run over DSL. Customers will experience incredible benefits by having telecommuters with the same dial plans as the primary business location and with the same phone functionality as if they were sitting at their desks. Those far outweigh the occasional QoS issues they may have if they are on their DSL or cable modem connection and decide to download a Napster file.

Q Can you tell me about IP dial tone and virtual PBX services?

A Our virtual PBX service is nationally available. In Denver and Washington, D.C., where we provide our dialtone service, customers can also select the virtual PBX service. Outside those markets, customers can purchase the Virtual hosted PBX service with dialtone from a LEC or CLEC. To the user, it's a voice line phone number or a collection of DIDs (direct inward dialing) that provides PSTN access, long-distance from any provider, E911, operator assistance-all the things most people don't place a high value on from a differentiation standpoint, but the stuff everyone is accustomed to having.

Q What's your take on Level 3's VoIP efforts?