Fresh from accepting the Global
Crossing Ltd. merger plans, Frontier Communications now intends
to forge its way past circuit-based telephony boundaries.
Frontier Communications Tuesday announced the company is joining forces
with Lucent Technologies to design and
build an Internet protocol telephony network.
When completed, the IP telephony network is expected to carry all of
Frontier’s voice traffic by the year 2002.
As part of the deal, Lucent will provide trunking and universal access
gateway products to Frontier for enabling interoperability between its
existing circuit network and its emerging IP telephony network.
The core of Frontier’s IP telephony network is Lucent Technologies’
softswitch. The Bell Labs-developed
software switch operates on standard computer workstations. According to
Lucent, the software switch provides all of the traditional features
offered on circuit-based phone switches at a fraction of the cost.
Rolla Huff, Frontier president and chief operating office, said partnering
with Lucent would facilitate Frontier’s ability to build a carrier class IP
telephony network.
“By collaborating with IP innovators such as Lucent, Frontier is the first
to make carrier class IP telephony a reality,” Huff said. “This world-class
IP network gives us the scalability and reliability we need to deliver our
IP application networking services with Silicon economics.”
Brian Fink, Frontier vice president of systems and products, said the IP
telephony network has been tested and will be ready for a limited launch in
about a month.
“Over the past quarter, we’ve conducted extensive testing of trunking
gateway and softswitch technology, simulating live production network
environments in our Denver labs,” Fink said.
Depending on the results of further testing in a limited launch, Fink said
Frontier plans to offer IP telephony services throughout the U.S. next year.
“We’ll initially deploy IP telephony in three U.S. cities next month and
plan to expand our network to include 15 to 20 cities nationwide by the
first half of 2000,” Fink said. “We expect to have 100 percent of our
traffic traversing our IP network by year-end 2002.”
Nina Aversano, Lucent president of global service provider business in
North American, said the new softswitch technology is the key to evolving
voice and data IP telephony networks.
“This new technology will enable us to help customers such as Frontier
quickly design, build and evolve communications networks that can handle
any service imaginable; from express-lane data connections to
next-door-quality voice calls.”
Under a separate agreement with Sonus
Networks, Lucent is providing Frontier with the Sonus GSX9000 Open
Services Switch.
The Sonus product is a trunking gateway that provides high capacity access
between old circuit-based networks and new packetized networks. The Sonus
trunking gateway works as a voice-over-packet central office switch that
extends the scalability and service potential of current public voice
networks.
Hassan Ahmed, Sonus president and chief operating officer, said the company
is thrilled to be partnering with Frontier and Lucent in order to make
packet telephony a working reality.
“Our vision has been to enable a new generation of applications for
integrated voice and data services, through the migration of telephony from
circuit networks to packet networks,” Ahmed said.
“With their new voice-over-packet network and Lucent’s softswitch
technology, Frontier is taking a leadership position in the industry,
delivering not only the traditional telephony services their customers
expect, but also innovative, new applications enabled by IP.”
