Verizon begins Class 5 replacement

CHICAGO--

Verizon Communications today announced it has deployed its first softswitch in a central office, marking the next phase of the RBOC’s transition to packet switching.

Verizon officials said the carrier is ripping out six Nortel DMS100 switches in communities California and Washington State and compressing their functions into two Nortel Succession softswitches. All six areas are high growth areas in former GTE territories and serve a mix of business and residential customers. The demographics make those central offices the ideal testbed for Verizon’s packet-switching trials, said Barry Paulson, Verizon chief engineer.

Verizon's Barry Paulson, Keiko Harvey
and Mark Wegleitner unveil the company's new
packet switching plan

“This is our first step into a full local switching platform,” Paulson said in an interview at Supercomm 2004. “We wanted to get firsthand experience with the technology. This is a like for like replacement. We’re not touting it as a new service. We’re mainly trying to learn.”

The deployment is Verizon’s second foray into packet switching. In 2002, Verizon began replacing its tandem and long-distance infrastructure with Nortel softswitches. Now with packet-switching in the core, Verizon is moving the technology further toward the network edge, allowing the next-generation technology to take over the critical applications it sells directly to customers.

Paulson said, however, that Verizon is still far from deploying the technology end-to-end. It’s customers, both business and consumer, will notice no difference in service, all of their traffic arriving TDM as usual. TDM voice and Centrex traffic will pass through IP gateways coming to and from the switches. Only long-distance traffic will be routed entirely IP through the core.

While Verizon is deploying the technology mainly for operational efficiency, Paulson said these trials will ultimately help Verizon design its end-to-end IP services. Verizon is now in the process of launching an Internet-based VoIP consumer and small business service over broadband connections, but it eventually plans on transforming it into a network-based service. On the enterprise side, Verizon plans to launch Centrex IP and managed IP PBX services in 2005, Paulson said.

“We want to be 100% packet when we’re done,” Paulson said.