Cisco Systems' new convergence products are an attempt to signal that packet telephony is ready for prime time.
Cisco this week announced four new products and a service program for melding voice, data and video over a campus packet infrastructure. Cisco claims the products can help reduce user telephony equipment and services costs, and support new multimedia applications.
Among the new products is Cisco CallManager 2.2, call processing software that runs on a Windows NT server. It supports up to 100 users in a small or branch office.
Version 2.2 features enhanced H.323 interoperability and support for the Windows Telephony Application Program Interface, which enable development of voice applications on the Windows operating system. H.323 is a standard for running multimedia over packet networks.
CallManager 2.2 also includes a browser-based call attendant console with drag-and-drop call routing; a digital gateway to PBXs or public networks that supports up to four T-1s; and a voicemail system called Cisco Valet.
The Rogers Group, a road construction firm in Nashville, Tenn., has had CallManager installed for about a year. The company has 35 users in three of its 70 sites conversing over a data infrastructure, says Telecom Administrator Alan Perry.
According to Perry, packet telephony is just about ready for prime time.
"It's not the IP packet area that has had the problems; it's been the gateway and talking to the local exchange carrier," he says. "As long as I'm in the packet domain, I've had no problems. The only pain I've really felt is in the gateway process of dumbing it down to speak on the public switched telephone network."
Another new convergence product is the VSC2700, a voice switch controller for Cisco's Catalyst 8500 LAN switches. The VSC2700 is designed to replace or offload tandem PBXs and switch calls over an ATM campus, metropolitan-area or wide-area network.
The VSC2700, which is a result of Cisco's acquisition of LightSpeed, interprets PBX signaling to set up ATM circuits. Cisco plans to evolve this technology to embrace other transmission media, such as packet-over-SONET, in the future, says Byron Henderson, director of marketing in Cisco's enterprise line of business.
Cisco also rolled out the multimedia conference manager (MCM) for its MC3810 multiservice access unit. This enhancement is intended to manage H.320 or H.323 video bandwidth and guarantee quality-of-service for video on a converged network.
For packetized voice, Cisco unveiled voice-over-frame relay and voice-over-IP software enhancements for its 2600 and 3600 series routers. The software supports Frame Relay Forum standards FRF.11 and FRF.12 for multivendor interoperability, and allow users to bypass tandem PBXs for voice switching.
For voice over IP, the software supports integrated voice response and RADIUS features for user authentication, and greater scalability, Cisco says. Cisco also unveiled an ISDN Basic Rate Interface voice interface card for the 2600 and 3600 routers that provide a two-channel BRI connection to a PBX.
Lastly, Cisco's Network Implementation Service (NIS) offering provides project management, engineering, staging and installation of packet telephony and multiservice campus networks. Pricing for this service is on a per-unit basis.
CallManager 2.2 is free to existing customers and will be available in May. Telephone and gateway licenses cost $125 per user.
Pricing for the VCS2700 is based on configuration. It will be available in April. MCM capabilities on the MC3810 cost $6,495 and are available now. NIS is also available now.
