ATLANTA - Cabletron will fill out the voice aspect of its IP telephony strategy soon, but it's not likely to include plans to offer IP phones.
In an interview with Network World at the NetWorld+Interop 99 show, Cabletron CEO Piyush Patel and chief operating officer Romulus Pereira say the company will articulate its strategy for supporting voice on its data networking equipment within the next two months. Of the four major LAN internetworking vendors, Cabletron is the only one that has not disclosed a plan for adding or supporting PBX and call processing capabilities on its switches and routers.
"We're not doing a good job at marketing our voice strategy," Patel admits.
Currently the company offers voice support on its FlowPoint DSL devices and resells a voice over IP gateway from Hypercom under an OEM arrangement. Its SmartSwitch LAN switches and routers are also "voice ready," Patel claims. He says these switches and routers can classify traffic as well as establish priority and quality of service based on transport layer information.
Cabletron also offers some service provisioning and PBX management capabilities in its Spectrum management platform. In addition, Cabletron has an equity investment in Mockingbird, a company that makes Class 4 tandem switches for toll bypass applications.
This is all designed to work with existing circuit switched PBX infrastructures rather than migrating users away from that environment and onto a packet network.
"A faster way [to converge voice and data] is through a voice gateway," Pereira says. "People are not going to throw away their PBX."
Once the market demands distributed, packet-based PBX functionality, Cabletron will isolate some PBX capabilities onto a SmartSwitch line card then add FXO, FXS and E&M line cards to its routers and switches to connect them to analog telephony gear.
"We chose to take a more practical approach," Patel says.
This is in contrast to competitors like Cisco and 3Com who are already shipping packet PBXs and IP telephones. Cabletron IP telephones, however, are not likely to turn up anytime soon, if at all. The company prefers adding data to wireless phones.
"IP phones will be the last thing adopted in a mass manner," Pereira says. "The wireless people will win out in that space."
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