Emergent entices carriers with hosted VoIP solution

Emergent Network Solutions, a Dallas, Texas-based provider of next generation voice infrastructure, introduced a VoIP infrastructure package for wholesale carriers, Internet service providers and competitive carriers this week that can help them offer residential VoIP or hosted IP Centrex services.

The E-REV (ENTICE Residential/Enterprise VoIP) solution includes a softswitch, feature server, session controller and a Web front end for customer self-provisioning and enhanced services such as prepaid. It is built by combining technology from both Emergent’s ELICIT (Emergent Local Integrated Carrier Internet Telephony) local and enhanced services framework and its flagship ENTICE open solutions call control platform, which was launched in September 2003.

Emergent has been doing business for about three years. It was founded by former members of Lucent’s research and development team and is just beginning to go public with its products and its image.

“We’re taking all these concepts that were being rolled around and screwed up—including by Lucent—the last few years and turning it into a nice working, interoperable product suite,” said Nathan Franzmeier, CEO of Emergent Network Solutions.

The softswitch in E-REV supports carrier-grade call control, translations, routing and provisioning for H.323, SIP, MGCP or H.248 network elements. The session controller comes with NAT/firewall traversal and topology hiding. The Session controller also supports STUN (simple traversal of user datagram protocol) and has a built in SIP registrar.

In addition to an enhanced services package that includes voicemail with email notification, conferencing and auto attendant capabilities and a full compliment of local calling features, E-REV enables wholesale carriers to host VoIP for other providers using it Web-based provisioning that can be partitioned at multiple levels.

“We aim at carriers in the wholesale business because we can raise their margins by offering an overlay onto their existing wholesale networks,” Franzmeier said.

The platform scales up to a half-million user accounts and has been deployed with leading IP customer premises equipment vendors including Cisco, Azatel, Sipura, SNOM, Grandstream, Mediatrix, Zoom, i3 micro, D-Link, Polycom and Audiocodes.

Franzmeier said Emergent is one of the few companies that provide softswitch and feature server capabilities and also provides its own session controller.