Holy Grail beckons broadband voice ops - Industry Trend or Event

Delivering bundled voice and data services is the engine driving the incumbents into the twenty-first century--but others want a shot, too.

A group of equipment vendors based in the United States plans to develop the first industry-wide program for testing Voice over Broadband (VoB) interoperability. The initiative could promote large-scale deployments and help competitive operators catch up with the incumbents and deliver bundled voice and data services.

The group, formed last year, has already attracted the attention of European competitive operators that mostly face kit developed with standard U.S. interfaces.

Mass deployment

Taking standards specified by the ATM Forum, DSL Forum, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the cable Television Laboratories initiative, the Open VoB group will test equipment interoperability and publish an implementation guide in an effort to accelerate VoB deployment.

"The goal is to move the technology into a mass deployment technology," said Ken Cavanaugh, chairman of the Open VoB, based in Richardson, Texas, and director of business development of General Bandwidth Inc. of Austin, Texas, a leading member of the association.

"Right now in the U.S. interoperability is the real problem," said Chris Hansen, senior DSL architect at Intel Corp., of Santa Clara, California. "Everyone is going for this Holy Grail of bundling services [Internet access and voice] to maintain their customer base."

But VoB is harder for competitive operators to deliver than for incumbents as competitors focus on voice or data, but rarely both.

According to Telechoice Inc., a U.S. telecoms research firm, voice and data competitive local exchange carriers will likely partner to provide VoB services. Several such partnership trials have been set up in the U.S. between Northpoint and Focal, Covad and ICG, and Rhythms and Intermedia.

Open gateways

U.S. incumbents are encouraged to provide VoB by a clause in the 1996 Telecom Act. "There is a legislative incentive for incumbents," said Intel's Hansen. "If they can prove that they're providing in-region voice competition, then they'll [be allowed to] provide long-distance services,"

Open VoB's first priority is interoperability for voice over digital subscriber line (VoDSL), but Cavanaugh maintained that the group is not a standards body. "There are standards, but they're not necessarily interoperable. There is no standards-based equipment," said Cavanaugh. "Service providers want open gateways so that they can use multiple vendors. They don't want to be locked in to certain [customer premises equipment] because the voice gateway they chose has a partnership with a certain company."

The lack of interoperability is a bigger problem in the U.S. than in Europe as U.S. operators are closer to deploying VoB, and specifically VoDSL.

According to Telechoice, wide-scale deployment of VoDSL will not begin until the second half of 2001. By year end 2004, Telechoice forecasts that there will be two million DSL lines with VoDSL and 10.7 million VoDSL telephone numbers in use in the U.S.

However, the first operator to join Open VoB is Aberdeen, Scotland-based Atlantic Telecom plc. Even though Atlantic does not perceive interoperability as the most pressing issue right now for VoB in Europe, the operator wants to address interoperability issues.

In November, the Open VoB staged its first "CallFest" at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Laboratory in Durham, New Hampshire, where multiple vendors tested its implementation model for the ATM Forum's AAL2 loop emulation service standard. From this and future interoperability tests, the Open VoB will publish an implementation guide and submit it to the ADSL and DSL Forums.

"The [DSL] Forum welcomes any such multi-company contributions that seek to move interoperable broadband standards forward," said Gavin Young, chairman of the DSL Forum's technical committee.

COPYRIGHT 2001 EMAP Media Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group