Cisco delves into IADs

(Telephony) Although numerous vendors already clutter the IAD market, Cisco Systems is jumping into the space anyway. Today the vendor announced its new IAD product family aimed at providing equipment for service providers to deploy into small and medium-sized businesses.

The new IAD2400 series is intended to reduce the time and cost involved with the delivery of managed voice and data services.

“What is really unique is that service providers that have a lot of circuit-switched equipment can deploy today in TDM and can switch to packet [based] without a truck roll,” said Mark Monday, director of marketing for Cisco’s managed premise solutions division in the service provider line of business. “Others can’t do TDM and then to call agents without having to go out to the customer site,” he added.

The equipment supports T1 and DSL uplinks and is already in trials with several service providers. BroadRiver Communications, Cbeyond Communications and CTC Communications are all trialing the new IADs.

“For a lot of customers, running Cisco products end-to-end is a huge benefit because they are running the IOS operating software throughout,” Monday said.

Monday pointed to the growing Internet needs of small and medium-sized businesses as a big driver for the equipment. “We want to capture that market,” he said.

The equipment has been shipping since December 15 of last year.