THE FUTURE AS SEEN THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

CALL SCREENING

Cable needs a differentiator if it truly wants to compete with telephone providers that have reliably delivered voice service for more than 100 years. Tollbridge Technologies, an IP telephony gateway vendor, thinks it can make the difference with an IP-based interactive onscreen television interface.

The OST lets cable subscribers make and receive voice calls or access voice mail and use other telephony features via a graphical user interface on their TV screens. While some might see this as overkill for an industry just getting into the telephony space, Kevin Woods, Tollbridge's vice president of product development, sees it as a way to pull subscribers away from the competition and do it in a way that is comfortable for cable operators themselves. “Telephony is weird for [multiple systems operators]. It's a different type of service than anything they offer,” Woods said.

The foundation is Tollbridge's IP voice gateway that sits at a cable headend and interfaces with the public network. That gateway takes incoming voice signals, packetizes them and delivers them via IP networks to newer digital set-top boxes that decode the data and deliver it to the GUI's menu of options on the TV screen.

The product is not ready for prime time. Tollbridge only recently started showing it to potential customers, Woods said. “There's strategic value in this,” he said. “A satellite provider could not do this very easily. A traditional telco could not do this. It puts a strategic user interface on it that only the MSO can offer.”
— Jim Barthold
www.tollbridgetech.com

PACKING ON THE DS-3s

For carriers looking to make the most of existing OC-3 networks, Adtran's Opti-3 multiplexer, which puts up to three DS-3 circuits over a single OC-3, may turn a few heads. The system, which is an expansion of Adtran's Total Access family of integrated access devices and concentrators, allows carriers to pack additional DS-3s onto OC-3 lines rather than spend money on additional Sonet multiplexers, said David Melvin, director of marketing for Adtran's carrier networks division.

“This started out as a request from our largest customer last spring,” said Melvin, who declined to name the customer. “This company wanted to be able to put additional DS-3s over fiber but wanted to know if it could do this without springing for more Sonet equipment.”

That is evidence of just how important it is for carriers to keep their capital expenditures down. Most want to forgo new deployment expenses — even small ones — for now if they can. One consequence is that they are not being shy about exploiting the leverage they have against their vendors in a sagging economy.

“A lot of them are putting costlier plans to re-architect their networks on the back burner,” Melvin said. “That is one of the main things our fiber product group has been responding to.”

James Crowley, senior systems engineer for Adtran's optical systems group, added, “It's a fully open Sonet-compliant system, redundant and interoperable with GR-253 Sonet muxes.”
— Dan O'Shea
www.adtran.com