Market Information
n Circuit
Switch: Alcatel, Siemens and Fujitsu are active in the major BSNL/MTNL
contracts for its basic telephony wireline exchanges. The local companies
include ITI and HFCL. Motorola, Lucent, Ericsson, and Nokia have played a major
role in ushering in the cellular telephony networks of India. With the arrival
of CDMA, the Asian brigade too arrived, in the form of Hyundai, LG, ZTE and
Samsung.
|
Technology Comparison |
| Circuit Switch
|
Soft Switch
|
|
Connection-oriented. There is a dedicated 64 kbps voice channel reserved for
every voice call through the network. This channel goes unused during the silent
periods of a conversation.
|
Packet network. Connection-less transmission. There is efficient utilization
of the bandwidth available in the network.
|
|
As there is a dedicated channel reserved, toll quality of voice is possible
|
As the voice traffic goes through compression and a shared pipe which may or
may not be managed, there is question mark on voice quality.
|
|
Centralized architecture where the central offices (CO) become key links in
the network. Therefore massive investments required to build in redundancies.
|
Distributed architecture, where media gateways are placed at the edge of the
network. Therefore, redundancy is automatically and affordably in-built in this
scheme.
|
|
Software, hardware and applications are packaged within a single proprietary
box.
|
Products are standards based and are open
|
|
Less room for innovation
|
Free to choose best-in-the-class products and the liberty to innovate and
customize is great.
|
|
IP services like Internet dial-up either get offloaded from the local/tandem
exchange and get transported through a parallel routed network or an ATM/Frame
Relay network.
|
Network already ready for multimedia traffic including data and video traffic
in addition to voice traffic. Parallel/overhead deployment of resources not
required.
|
| Tried and tested. Engineered for five 9 reliability and very reliable. |
Technology not tested. As further development takes place, vendors promise to
match the reliability of traditional switches |
n VoIP Switch:
According to Synergy Research Group, in the carrier VoIP market segment,
Sonus, Cisco and CommWorks were the market leaders. Vendors which helped drive
revenue growth in the quarter included Sonus, Cisco, and Telica. In India,
Vocaltec leads the VoIP deployment. Cisco has been busy in this space for some
time. UTStarcom is the new significant player in the Indian horizon. Worldwide,
it is the leading softswitch vendor. Having acquired Commsworks just recently,
its presence in India for this market is further strengthened. Other new
companies are Veraz, Audiocodes, Sonus, Nuera and Arelnet. The TDM switch
vendors too are heard talking of softswitches these days.
|
|
| Alon
Weinstein,
country manager (India), Vocaltec Communications |
| Sudhir
Chopra, GM (voice
network division), Alcatel India |
| Sunil
Kulkarni, GM
(marketing and business development), GTSS, Motorola |
|
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