AudioCodes hears midrange call for media gateway

ATLANTA--Israel-based AudioCodes, a one-time technology and board-level provider of VoIP components, continued its expansion of full system offerings this week at the Voice on the Net show here, introducing a mid-density product for original equipment manufacturers called the Mediant 5000 Media Gateway.

The Mediant 5000 will help network equipment providers, including softswitch vendors, provide a solution targeted to service providers and large enterprises.

The small, five-unit high gateway supports up to 2880 channels using various signaling protocols such as CAS, PRI, R2, and V5.2 as well as support for SS7 interworking and Sigtran. Supported call control protocols include MGCP, Megaco and TGCP.

One of the products important features, which grew out of the company’s origins as a supplier of echo cancellation and voice compression products for vendors, is an open platform based on the PICMG 2.16 architecture that allows third-parties to add single board computers for running value-added applications from the gateway.

Demand for the mid-density gateway resulted from both positive and negative forces within the VoIP market. “As signs of restructuring started to occur, customers started asking us to supply full systems rather than boards and modules, because service providers still need end-to-end solutions but the manufacturers can no longer build them all themselves,” said Ben Rabinowitz, vice president of AudioCodes' Systems Group.

On a more positive note, Rabinowitz said network equipment manufacturers have the welcome problem of not being able to meet all the VoIP opportunities coming from other markets such as cable and wireless.

“A cable media gateway is very different from a 3G gateway in terms of signaling and different equipment to interoperate with and different standards to [adhere to],” Rabinowitz said.

The gateway is currently in beta testing and will be generally available in the first quarter 2003.

AudioCodes also introduced this week an element management system for managing the company’s Mediant, Stretto (for wireless networks) and MediaPack gateway platforms.