BellSouth adds hosted VoIP to its packet portfolio

BellSouth declared itself open for market trials of its business-class hosted voice-over-IP service this week as the company launched service in Columbia, S.C., and Miami, Fla.

Pending the outcome of trials, BellSouth expects to roll out the service to other metropolitan areas later this year.

The service will use BellSouth’s regional IP backbone to carry business customer traffic rather than putting it across the Internet. "This is an in-region announcement, but when we go out of region we will still keep customers off the public Internet," said Mark Kaish, vice president of next generation solutions for BellSouth.

BellSouth’s VoIP portfolio consists of equipment-based services such as IP-PBXs, Centrex IP, which the company launched just last month, and now hosted VoIP. The carrier is using the portfolio approach to meet the needs of a wider array of business customers.

BellSouth is using a Siemens next-generation softswitch to deliver the new network-hosted VoIP services. "We have traditional Siemens switches, but this is the first softswitch implementation," Kaish said.

Over the last two years, BellSouth has evolved its underlying SONET infrastructure to a next-generation Multiservice Provisioning Platform and integrated Multi-Protocol Label Switching into its network core and edge and is running the BellSouth Regional IP Backbone utilizing this technology.

"These are not trials to see if we are going to do this. We are doing it. This is the future," Kaish said. He added that the sites were picked to determine the difference in demand and desired feature sets in both a large metro market and a medium-sized market.

As for addressing the business market, "We started at the high end of business because they are the ones that truly appreciate the feature sets. The business end is where the action is when it comes to taking true advantage of IP enablement," Kaish said.