Delta Three adopts Ericsson IP: Cisco Systems outlines carrier-class voice plans

Ericsson, which has been hinting for some time that it would develop an Internet protocol telephony gateway, said last week that Delta Three will be the first Internet telephony service provider to use its platform.

Built on the same technology as Phone Doubler, the IP Telephony Solution for Carriers is aimed at operators offering phone-to-phone and PC-to-phone IP calls. Delta Three, which is selling its IP capacity to other carriers, will deploy the product in 20 points of presence (POPs) worldwide and already has deployed it for calls between Israel, the United Kingdom and the U.S., said CEO Elie Wurtman. Delta Three will install the gateways in all future POPs.

"We saw that to move this business forward we needed to partner with a traditional telecom company like Ericsson," said Wurtman.

In its first version, the gateway will have a latency of less than 100 msec, said Mark Miller, director of Internet and business development for Ericsson. Delta Three will route as many calls as possible over its own IP backbone, bypassing the Internet where latency and jitter increase, he said.

Eventually, Delta Three will allow its carrier customers to offer multiple service levels, said Wurtman. Under one concept, customers could choose different service grades depending on price and call importance.

In other IP telephony news, Cisco Systems announced a three-step plan to introduce carrier-class voice to its customer base. The first part calls for Cisco to add an IP voice element to its routers and develop an IP-to-public network gateway.

"People thought IP was a toy for a long time," said Roland Acra, director of dial access marketing for Cisco. "We're here to prove that it's something businesses can use as a tool."

In the second phase, the company will scale its product up to larger port counts. The third phase will add specialized service applications.

In initial deployments, Cisco is concentrating on quality issues by using resource reservation protocols or by marking voice packets. In early tests, calls had 25 to 70 msec of delay to calls.

"If you consider that generally people like to keep it below 250 msec for business quality, it's pretty good," said Acra. "By marking the bits and honoring the right priorities, no matter how congested the backbone is, we can guarantee that we stay below that level."

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