VocalTec
Communications, Lucent
Technologies, and ITXC Corp. today
jointly announced they will develop complete compatibility between VocalTec
and Lucent IP telephony platforms.
Under the alliance, ITXC will operate as the carrier for the fully
interoperable IP telephony network.
Cross-operability will be enabled for Lucent’s PacketStar Internet
Telephony Server for Service Providers (ITS-SP) and VocalTec’s Ensemble
Architecture for use in voice and fax communications, routing,
authorization, authentication, accounting, billing, network management and
settlement services, the companies said.
The initial phase of development is expected to be operable in the Fall of
1998, and the companies plan to run the gateways on ITXC’s commercial
WWeXchange Service.
“Lack of vendor interoperability has remained one of the single most
serious impediments to the IP telephony industry,” said Hilary Mine,
senior vice president at Probe Research. “At the same time, no service
provider wants to be locked into a single vendor. Lucent and VocalTec will
enable ITXC to meet its customers’ longer term requirements by offering not
only vendor choice today, but also future-proofed interoperability on next
generation networks.”
“Until now these resellers, carriers, Internet service providers (ISPs),
and other Internet telephony service providers have had the unsatisfactory
choice of either being restricted to a single vendor with no possibility of
second sourcing or running products from multiple vendors in parallel,
incompatible
networks,” said Tom Evslin, chairman of ITXC Corp.
Israel-based VocalTec provides software for audio, video, data, and text
communications operating between personal computers and other
devices over the Internet. It also owns a minority interest in ITXC, a
wholesale provider of Internet telephony services.
Lucent Technologies is a designer and implementer of public and private
networks, using its communications systems, software, data networking
systems, business telephone services and microelectronics components.