An Israel-based company has revealed a product that it hopes will help settle the conflicts caused by multiple Internet telephony standards. ComGates Communications claims its CMG/CSS 2000 is the industry's first softswitch to provide on-the-fly switching of multiprotocol communications.
The conflicting standards among those that want to implement voice-over-Internet Protocol [VoIP] include session initiation protocol (SIP); H.323; and MGCP and MEGACO, which are Media Gateway Control protocols. The problem is that most of the equipment available today won't allow the communication to flow through a backbone of disparate devices, gateways and communications servers. The result usually locks a provider into one solution - and with the VoIP industry at such an early stage, that could be risky.
"When we started the company, we identified this multiprotocol issue as a major problem that needed to be addressed," says Benjamin Bar-Ness, vice president of marketing and business development at ComGates. "There's quite a menagerie of protocols, and since no one can predict what will prevail to the end -- or even if one of the existing protocols does -- you have a legacy buildup."
ComGates' solution is deployed in a managed network. A conversion layer in the softswitch translates the incoming protocol to the protocol of the end-point and sends it out. Until now, IP call transitions were handled by a proxy server, which may or may not be located near the softswitch. By incorporating the translation into the softswitch, the communication is faster.
ComGates' softswitch is built with flexibility, so as new or proprietary protocols arrive on the scene, only a software update to the softswitch is needed for it to support the new protocol.
ComGates unveiled the CMG/CSS 2000 softswitch at the recent Telecom Business Expo in New York, where it was demonstrated using a Pingtel SIP IP phone on one end and a PC client running Microsoft NetMeeting, which uses the first version of H.323, on the other. The company also ran demonstrations of SIP calls over MGCP networks.
Bar-Ness stresses that using the product doesn't change much of the architecture for backbone providers such as Level 3 Communications which were planning on, or are already using, softswitches. In fact, he says using the solution can speed up the IP call.
ComGates' mission for now is to find friends in the US Currently, Bar-Ness says, ComGates is in negotiations with several companies with strong sales forces to get the softswitch off the ground.
