A graceful migration?

Grace and networks don't seem to have much in common, but a joint venture between Newbridge Networks and TeleHub is focusing on a graceful migration from legacy circuit switches. The joint venture, called TeraBridge Technologies, is intended to meet needs for intelligent call and service control products to replace narrowband circuit-switching with broadband networks.

"Carriers see these switches as more of an expense than an asset," said Brian Jervis, executive vice president of Newbridge. "Narrowband and switching is not the way to go-the industry recognizes this," although people are going about it at very different paces, he said.

Jervis added that they want to make the migration quickly, and vendors such as Nortel Networks and Lucent Technologies are slowly rolling out similar equipment. While those vendors differ on that opinion, TeraBridge is touting its combination of Newbridge's switch and TeleHub's Virtual Access Services Platform software, as having the advantage of scalability and SS7.

"From a scalability perspective, TeleHub is the only proven solution of which I am aware," said Jennifer Pigg, senior vice president of data communications at The Yankee Group.

While Jervis gave a cost savings figure of about 50%, Pigg said, "Carriers should expect to save at least that, if not more." The TeraBridge architecture is "unique in its ability to support a converged voice and data network, not just for a few hundred users, but for tens of thousands of users," she added.

So what's wrong with the product? According to Pigg, network recovery is still a big concern in the voice over data market. "Until the recovery mechanism is better than what is currently available with Sonet, then you don't have a viable, scalable carrier-class solution."