Vendors pushing voice-over-DSL technology will try to impress service providers next week by showing for the first time that their gear is interoperable.
Nine vendors of customer site equipment and switching office equipment will demonstrate at the DSLcon conference in Denver that their boxes can work with the others. Interoperability is attractive to service providers because it means they can set up packet-voice networks without relying on a single vendor. The equipment makers must therefore compete against each other for carriers’ business, helping to keep prices down. Plus, interoperability means that carriers have options if one of these vendors goes belly up.
The nine companies slated to participate in the demo are Accelerated Networks Inc., Avail Networks Inc., Broadband Gateways Inc., Efficient Networks Inc., General Bandwidth Inc., ishoni Networks Inc., MetaSwitch, Polycom Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc. The companies worked through the industry group OpenVoB to establish the interoperability they will show off publicly at a DSLcon forum called OpenVoB Interoperability Showcase.
The vendors will demonstrate use of DSL links to carry ATM voice traffic using a standard known as AAL-2 loop emulation service, which simulates a circuit using ATM cells.