CenturyLink makes IP headway with Sonus

As merger-happy CenturyLink is rapidly growing beyond its small market roots, the telco is just as quickly joining the ranks of carriers that have adopted IP-based voice network foundations.

CenturyLink and its vendor partner, Sonus Networks, this week announced that the first phase of the infrastructure transformation, which saw media gateways, policy management servers and session border control gear deployed in 22 cities, has been completed. That buildout took just four months late last year at a time when CenturyLink was busy absorbing and integrating the operations of Embarq.

Kevin Summers, director of product management for Sonus, said the vendor undertook the project in August 2009. He noted that Sonus was able to provide the telco with “billing mediation capability to quickly integrate into their back-office systems and meet some pretty tight deadlines.” (CenturyLink was unable to make a spokesperson available by deadline, as the company prepared to report first-quarter earnings.)

Specifically, CenturyLink deployed the Sonus GSX9000 Media Gateway, the Sonus PSX Call Routing and Policy Server, the Sonus Insight Element Management System and the Sonus Network Border Switch (NBS-9000. The NBS in particular sets the carrier up to support for advanced IP peering.

“They will be able to easily connect via SIP to various other carrier peers and transport media using a variety of codecs,” Summers said. “Further, CenturyLink will have a variety of controls over that peering traffic at their fingertips including policy based routing for optimizing cost per load.”

The NBS also supports media transcoding and centralized call admission control, security, and SLA enforcement and measurement, all of which could translate into new services from CenturyLink. “This has the effect of dramatically simplifying their management and operation of these interfaces to other networks,” Summers said.

Before combining with Embarq to form CenturyLink, Monroe, La.-based CenturyTel might have been viewed as an example of the type of telco, with a focus on small, rural markets, that did not have much motivation to migrate to IP. Now beefed up as CenturyLink and set to grow much larger via a pending merger with Qwest Communications, the one-time small telco is in lock-step with that migration.

“The business case has to be there to push telcos forward to transform their networks,” Summers said. “The motivation can be in the form of a push or a pull.” The push might be something like dealing with the reality of having aging infrastructure no longer supported by vendors or no longer having your own expertise to manage the legacy infrastructure. The federal government’s National Broadband Plan and stimulus programs also could be considered as "pushy" factors.

By "pull," Summers means new revenue-generating opportunities and lower operational cost benefits that for years have been touted as reasons to move from TDM to IP.
Another factor, Summers said, is that the flat nature of IP architectures becomes particularly appealing as carriers are expanding their geographic boundaries, something no doubt on CenturyLink’s mind again as it looks pair up with Qwest.

Sonus might be in the catbird seat as that deal moves toward completion. Aashu Virmani, senior director of marketing for Sonus, said the vendor not only had worked with Embarq and CenturyTel previous to the CenturyLink’s peering-focused project, but also has worked with Qwest on more subscriber-focused IP deployments.