Progress on Converged Services Continues

Carriers and vendors in the U.S. and abroad continue to lay groundwork for delivering converged services.

Cincinnati Bell and Convergys have entered into an agreement to deploy the latter's convergent business support software for creating, launching and activating new products and bundled offerings of voice, video and data for residential and business customers.

Metro Ethernet services have caught the eye of BellSouth. The carrier announced plans to offer a new Metro Ethernet Premium Service using Cisco 7600 Series routers. With the new service, BellSouth will be offering data and storage center connectivity, business continuity, image delivery, and video and voice over IP. The carrier will be offering service level agreement (SLA) commitments to its premium service customers covering network latency, availability and time-to-repair.

In Europe, BT continues deployment of its 21CN (21st Century Network), announcing an agreement with Alcatel for its service routing and management solution. The Alcatel offering will provide IP/Ethernet switching for BT's U.K. PSTN transformation trial, which is piloting VoIP.

BT's U.K. transformation initiative will move all its British network to a multi-service, IP-based infrastructure by 2009. Voice and data services will be converged over a single IP/MPLS network.The BT PSTN transformation trial will use Alcatel's 7750 Service Router to maintain quality of service (QoS) for "packetized" voice and data across multiple VPNs. The Alcatel 5620 Service Aware Manager will enable BT to deliver rapid, scalable and manageable IP/MPLS and Ethernet network-based services.

For 21C trials in Germany, BT announced that it is working with Siemens and Juniper Networks. Siemens' SURPASS hiG 1200 Trunk Gateway, a carrier-grade Voice over IP (VoIP) trunk media gateway, will provide mediation between the core IP infrastructure of BT's next-generation network and the existing circuit-switched network. Juniper Networks' IP/MPLS routing technology will provide service convergence and flexibility at the network edge, along with the capability to operate multi-Terabit speeds within the core of the network.

Converged services also are being tailored for vertical markets. Global Crossing, for example, announced the IP convergence solutions suite for the financial services industry. The solution will deliver VoIP and IP video over a global MPLS-based IP VPN. Officials say the VPN will provide three classes of service with different quality of service levels. This should let firms run multiple applications -- including IP turrets,instantaneous trading and multicast services -- at the same time.

Meanwhile, rural ILECs looking to deploy services over converged digital networks are the target market for Pannaway Technologies, Inc., which has released a call control manager and broadband access manager to deliver and manage IP-based services. The solution, say officials, enables telcos to provide advanced intelligent transport equipment as they expand their service offerings. The ideas is that rural ILECs can offer new broadband services -- such as parental control, HDTV and digitized voice " with helpdesk style support.