Nortel inks MCI softswitch deal

ATLANTA — Nortel announced today at Supercomm that it has been selected as the primary vendor by MCI to provide softswitches as part of the carrier’s move to send all of its voice traffic over an IP network.

MCI has been deploying Nortel’s Succession super-class softswitches and Passport Packet voice gateways since January, according to Rick Price, vice president of global engineering. In phase one of the move, the carrier plans to have 25 percent of its voice traffic transitioned to its IP core network by the end of the year. MCI plans to deploy another 15 gateways by the end of June to meet that goal. By 2005, MCI plans to have all of its voice riding over IP.

“This is really a migration of the DMS250 that we’ve had in the core for a long time,” said Price. “The touch and feel that the customers see will be exactly the same.”

The Nortel deployment applies only to the domestic parts of MCI’s network, though the company has plans to continue its strategy around the globe, he added.

MCI eventually plans to roll some of the enhanced services that are enabled by the softswitches.

The win takes on added significance for Nortel, which now has become the primary vendor for softswitching for two of the largest deployments to date. Two weeks ago, Sprint announced that it had begun deploying Succession softswitches in its local network as part of a wide-ranging Class 5 replacement program.