The IQ of IP

To date, voice-over-Internet telephony has offered consumers one big advantage: It's cheap. So cheap, in fact, that customers have been willing to overlook its drawbacks. Voice quality on packet-switched networks is poor compared with circuit-switched networks built to handle voice rather than data, and even common intelligent network features-such as custom calling, number portability, 800 Freephone and national prepaid card calling-have been unavailable over packet-switched networks.

But all that is about to change. "The convergence of telecommunications services on the Internet protocol opens up a rich vein of new architectural opportunities for integrating services," says Vint Cerf, senior vice president of Internet architecture and technology at MCI WorldCom.

Not to mention that IP telephony providers cannot compete on price alone forever. Too many pressures are equalizing the playing field. Regulatory rules are changing, excess capacity on corporate networks is waning as voice over IP becomes more popular, and traditional carriers are bringing down their prices.

IP carriers are quickly improving voice quality, but those with packet-switched networks must find ways to add intelligent network and Advanced Intelligent Network features to their customer offerings if they are to grow. "Putting AIN over IP offers a valuable linkage between the all-IP future that may transpire and the mixed environment in which telecommunications now exists," Cerf says.

Service providers such as Qwest Communications and Level 3 are in a big rush to implement AIN functionality, and network architectures are quickly evolving to enable full-service voice over IP.

"The inclusion of AIN-like features is critical for the enhancement of [voice-over-IP] platforms and user functionality," says Guy K. Cook, vice president of Internet services at Qwest Communications. "Qwest is aggressively implementing AIN functionality in our [voice-over-IP] service offerings as the technology continues to evolve."

Network equipment manufacturers are eager to help. Vendors such as Alcatel, Ascend Communications, Bay Networks, Cisco Systems, Compaq, IEX Corp., Lucent Technologies, Stratus and Tekelec are developing platforms-signal transfer point (STP) switches, components and software-to enable AIN over IP.

Lee Smith, vice president of strategy and business development at Tekelec, says that we might see some intelligent network features on IP networks sooner than expected. He predicts that next generation carriers may offer some meaningful applications during the first half of this year. "We will see things like calling party pays, authentication and prepaid calling pretty soon," he says.

Converging network architectures A new convergence story is occurring throughout the telecom industry. Is there anybody left who doesn't think packet-switched networks are more efficient? Packet-based Internet architectures promise to help companies save dramatically on transmission facility investments, while reducing the cost of toll charges for end users. Advances in voice compression and the popularity of packet-based Internet architectures-combined with leveling-out cost of fiber-based transmission-have made voice over IP economically attractive.

"Everybody is pushing on this, though some [carriers] get more attention than others," says Micaela Giuhat, director of intelligent network product marketing for IEX Corp.

Traditional carriers such as Bell Atlantic are searching for ways to make use of the cost-of-transmission advantages offered by packet switching in an increasingly data-centric world. "[Data networks] just pack more in. It's more efficient and quicker," says Mike Harvey, director of signaling and control architecture evolution at Bell Atlantic.

Tekelec's Smith predicts that a top-tier wireless carrier will announce plans to radically reduce costs using IP integration early this year.

That makes sense. After all, depending on whom you listen to-and how they measure it-many think that data has already overtaken voice on U.S. networks. Data traffic will make up about 90% of the traffic on the public network sometime between five and 10 years from now, says Ray Ritchie, Bellcore's executive director of voice-over-packet engineering. According to a recent report by research firm Decision Resources, the U.S. data communications market will grow to two-and-a-half times its current size of $20.2 billion during the next seven years.

In the meantime, traditional carriers also want to use IP to build cheaper databases that they can use for services such as 800-number and "Gate," which can help consumers protect their phones from unwanted 900-number calling. "Those databases are doing the things that we want them to do, but we are always interested in building cheaper databases, and IP gives us a way to look at databases that might be very cheap," says Harvey.

However, traditional network carriers are not rushing to throw away their old switches. Those war-horses still have more feature-rich services for customers than any vehicle out there. Though many services need SS7 to help out, custom local area signaling services rely predominantly on old-line switches.

That is the kind of AIN functionality that next generation operators desperately want in their networks. Carriers such as Qwest and Level 3 will first concentrate on improving voice-over-IP sound quality-but possibly sooner than anybody expected, they will begin adding intelligent network features to their customer offerings.

The result: IP networks will shortly begin to more closely resemble traditional networks at the same time that the public switched network begins to embrace a packet-switched future.

"All carriers are driven to the same purchase decisions right now," says Roderick K. Randall, vice president of marketing for Ascend's carrier signaling group. "None of them wants to buy a set of technologies that is inconsistent with where the future is going."

That is not to say, however, that traditional and packet-switched networks are on a so-called collision course, as some claim.

"There is no such thing as 'THE' network," says Bell Atlantic's Harvey. "The [public network] and IP are not going to crash in the near term; they will interwork."

It's all in the switch Despite the big splash they have made, IP networks will have to borrow from the public network to sail forward. For IP telephony to become a significant technology for voice transport, it must flow smoothly into the global ocean of wireline and wireless networks. Industry-standard SS7 is the ship that can bridge the two. "Before you worry about AIN, you need to worry about SS7," says Bellcore's Ritchie (see sidebar).

Ultimately, the future of voice over IP depends on the implementation of a new generation of IP service switches that provide IP networks with an interface to traditional voice networks. Eventual enhancements to these switches will allow voice over IP to catch up with the feature-rich revenue generators offered on the public network.

Today's IP gateways manufactured by companies such as Lucent, Cisco and Ascend allow voice transmissions to enter and leave the IP network through the use of standard handsets. These IP gateways bridge packet-based IP networks and the public network and provide basic call management, signal conversion and data compression. But they offer only a limited call management feature set compared with central office switches and large PBXs.

The next generation of telecom networks require more. Telephony equipment manufacturers such as IEX Corp. are expected to deliver the first true telco-grade IP service switches this summer.

"Our switch and intelligent network elements are unique in the marketplace due to the fact that they are vendor-independent," says IEX's Giuhat. "We are also very hardware-independent, meaning that we can scale up using the hardware choice of our customers."

Built to industry standards for public switches (for example, Bellcore's AIN 0.1 specifications and LSSGR), these new switches built by IEX, Ascend, Cisco, Lucent, Tekelec and others will combine subscriber line termination, time division multiplexing and operations support systems found in today's switches with IP gateway and data router functionality.

The defining characteristic of new AIN-over-IP networks is that the switches will not be large, monolithic, proprietary devices like the previous generation. Instead, IP-based service switches will be part of what Ascend calls a "distributed switch architecture," in which some components of the switch will serve as voice-over-IP gateways (Figure 1). This same distributed architecture can handle an asynchronous transfer mode backbone such as that being developed by Sprint.

"Everyone needs to talk to everyone else-whether you have an ATM-, IP- or circuit-switched network, so we have developed an architecture that allows for every one of the combinations," says Ascend's Randall.

Other components of the switch may provide the quality of service appropriate for either narrowband or wideband applications, with or without compression. The other aspect of this distributed switch architecture is the existence of something that Ascend calls a network control point (NCP), and Compaq calls a service control point (SCP). In either case, it is a server in which the intelligence for how to connect and control the network resides. The NCP/SCP is also where the SS7 network terminates on behalf of all these other distributed switch elements.

'Super-AIN' coming up Industry representatives find it hard to contain their excitement when they talk about the rich set of features that the combination of AIN over packed-switched networks will eventually yield. Along with other carriers, Internet service providers that harbor hopes of becoming competitive local exchange carriers and Internet telephony service providers such as AT&T Cerfnet are especially looking forward to the enhanced interoperability with the public network.

"[AIN over IP] opens up a vast new array of service offerings that allow better customer service, quicker purchase decision time and an overall competitive advantage for business," says Ascend's Randall.

AIN/IP integration will work behind the scenes to improve the way ISPs provide services. For instance, an ISP will be able to identify its premium customers based on caller ID and other information before the call is terminated. The ISP will then be able to find the most lightly loaded remote access concentrator in the network to give the customer premium service.

But not all the improvements will be invisible to customers. One of the first new consumer AIN features that will become available is Internet call waiting. Telcos would love to complete-and bill for-many of those calls that are not getting through while people are on the Internet. With AIN over IP, users will be able to have inbound caller ID appear on their screens. Carriers will be able to deliver the call and charge for it; users will get enhanced calling capabilities.

But that's just the beginning. Most of the planned services for the $20 billion to $30 billion annual call center market play on the fact that consumers still see value in personal, one-on-one communications in buying and solving problems about merchandise. On-line customer care is one example.

AIN functionality over IP will enable on-line customer care, for instance. Consumers buying anything from a Mercedes Benz to a pair of shoes will be able to talk to a live customer service representative on their PCs. The call center will be able to send voice, video and graphics. The CSR can appear on the Web page screen and show the consumer demonstrations, computer animations and video clips-you name it.

"End customers don't know anything about AIN, but they know that they expect 800 number services, credit card or third-party billing and all kinds of other things that rely on the AIN capabilities," says Bellcore's Ritchie.

Consumers may even finally get videoconferencing at a reasonable price.

"There's a lot coming down the road," says Randall. "I don't know what we did right, but this is a great time to be in this industry."

Reaching agreement on Advanced Intelligent Network/Internet protocol integration standards has been far from the most efficient process ever conceived. Faced with a proliferation of standards efforts, some are beginning to get frustrated.

With all the confusion over standards, it is heartening that there is so much agreement on one thing: SS7 is the key to the whole thing. SS7 "is the language that any telecom network that wants to interconnect must speak," says Mike Harvey, Bell Atlantic's director of signaling and control architecture evolution. "It is the Esperanto of the telephony world."

The problem with standards such as the International Telecommunication Union's H.323 is that they are primarily "on-net" call management schemes, in which the call signaling information shares primarily the same call paths used to transport the voice-over-IP service. Information for call control-such as credit authorization, physical IP address, calling name or transport route assignments-must be contained within the IP network used to transport the call. This severely limits a service provider's ability to offer network features such as dynamic call routing, nationwide prepaid cards, subscriber roaming, 800 service and other services that require access to nationwide, or "off-net," databases.

Today's intelligent networks use SS7 to separate many of the key elements of call routing and service control from the transport network. Voice over IP cannot economically offer many of the features now provided by circuit-switched technology without an enhanced version of SS7.

"I call it SS8," says Roderick K. Randall, vice president of marketing for Ascend's carrier signaling group. "It is going to be compatible with the existing SS7 infrastructure, but reach [signal transfer points] and STP functionality on the IP network as well."

If only everything could be so easy.

The next phase of standardization is much more complicated. At its essence, a new set of standards is needed that covers how a network control point (NCP)-also known as a service control point (SCP)-can communicate to new equipment such as voice over IP gateways or voice-over-asynchronous transfer mode gateways. The industry also needs to settle on a standard for how those devices and the NCPs communicate with IP or ATM backbone switches to guarantee quality of service, bandwidth, and the type and class of service, among other things. Then all of that needs to be centrally coordinated and controlled so carriers can handle billing, administration and global route control.

"It is extremely important for IP and ATM standards forums to take a serious look at AIN concepts and integrate them into their work," says Micaela Giuhat, director of product marketing for intelligent networks at IEX Corp.

Standardization efforts on these matters got off with a bang. First Stratus teamed with Cisco Systems, Bay Networks, 3Com and MCI WorldCom to create the Internet intelligent network initiative, an effort that spun off several other related standardization efforts. Initially, they all agreed to build Internet call diversion capability, which was essentially an expanded version of Q.931.

Level 3 Communications then initiated the first major standardization effort called the IP device control. Yet another effort was started by a number of vendors, including Bellcore and Cisco, called simple gateway control protocol.

A yet more advanced version was created through discussions with Ascend, Cisco, Bellcore and Level 3, as well as a number of other industry leaders. This latter effort, known as the media gateway control protocol, attempted to combine the advantages of Q.931 with IP device control and simple gateway control protocol.

And if that weren't enough, Bellcore recently announced yet another initiative to bring vendors and carriers together to form an all-encompassing standard.

But more is not better for everyone. As the protocol efforts have begun to incorporate more and more issues, a group of companies has formed to create a more "lightweight," voice-only standard that avoids the more complicated multimedia issues.

Things have gotten a bit out of hand, according to Jack Kozik, intelligent network architecture director with Lucent Technologies.

"We seek convergence in the standards area," Kozik says. "Our customers will be delighted to see the list of standardization efforts shrink."