Tollbridge sees market for cable IP telephony

(Telephony) Tollbridge Technologies has introduced a gateway to deliver voice services to cable subscribers by bridging the gap between the DOCSIS cable network and the existing phone network. The product bridges the gap between the dying CLECs and cable’s emergence as a competitive voice provider.

CLECs “were funded by debt,” said Gary Tauss, Tollbridge’s CEO. “When they spent that debt money and couldn’t get anymore, they went away. Now we’re seeing this second wave, which we think is driven by the MSOs and the IXCs. We’re focusing in on the MSOs.”

Tollbridge’s product--an IP digital terminal (IPDT)--is a PSTN gateway that links the cable and telephone networks.

“This is optimized to manage a large number of residential gateways or MTAs (media terminal adapters) using VoIP or soft switch protocols,” said Kevin Woods, Tollbridge’s marketing vice president.

The product lets cable operators migrate to VoIP service while subscribers continue to use existing telephones, he said.

“The concept is to start by supporting the existing installed base of telephones, then, with new subscribers over time, you can add the special phone appliances like the Cisco phones,” he said.

Tollbridge embeds a softswitch in the gateway to let existing installed equipment connect as if it were a standard phone attached to the original circuit-switched network. The product suite includes a voice module that supports up to 12,000 telephone lines per gateway; a redundant gigabit Ethernet interface to link to hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) cable networks; and interoperability with PacketCable-compatible MTAs and cable modem termination systems (CMTS) vendors.

Woods said the voice module is “unique in the industry. We had to develop that module.”

The voice processing board has the CODEC packetization and MTA characteristics needed for cable where “you need to address a lot of residential gateways but not a huge multiple factor of telephone lines,” he said. “That translates to a different sort of product than you would have in the DSL world, where you have a large number of telephone lines per subscriber.”

Tollbridge plans to feed an emerging market.

“If you’re an existing provider and you have access to all logical or physical wire that goes to a potential subscriber whose name and address you know, voice services are just slam-dunk revenue,” Woods concluded.