For telecom network convergence you need to know the old and the new, and the borrowed, and the blue…

There is a saying here in the UK that we use when couples get married, which is that the bride needs to wear:

  ‘something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue’

Whilst writing about what you can see and hear from Aculab if you visit us this week at the Convergence India exhibition in New Delhi, that phrase came to mind. So let's start with what the old and the new mean in relation to effective telecom convergence.

Something old, something new

If you use Wikipedia (and who doesn’t?) to search for ‘convergence’, you find multiple definitions, and luckily for us, they have put some work into a specific definition for telecommunications convergence – ‘emerging telecommunications technologies, and network architecture used to migrate multiple communications services into a single network’, or ‘ more specifically as the coming together of telecommunications, computing and broadcasting into a single digital bit-stream’.

Convergence therefore implies a knowledge and support for older (legacy) protocols and techniques, combined with support for the latest approaches. It’s the sort of thing you only get from vendors, such as Aculab, who have been involved in the industry for many years and became established by supporting the traditional methods, and have since evolved to support other approaches. 

Aculab has been involved in telecommunications even longer than convergence has been on the agenda. To us, the legacy is TDM, the PSTN, SS7, slow-speed data, and a set of voice standards from the earliest days when a voice circuit was a 300Hz to 3400Hz audio signal digitised and encapsulated within a fixed timeslot of a T1 or E1 time-division-multiplexed signal. The good news is that we still support all the legacy, but have evolved our hardware and software to support newer (IP-based) solutions in addition. We don’t force you to move from one to the other, you can mix and match as you wish. The utopia of the single network supporting everything is there for you to attain, and we can provide multiple pathways to it.

So Aculab has the old, and the new – defining it in the broadest terms, we support TDM-based and IP-based telecommunications. The ApplianX gateways we will be showing on our stand are one example of this old+new.

Something borrowed…

Yes we have this too! Our latest product, that we will gladly talk to you about at the show, is Aculab Cloud. It is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, that borrows the capabilities of our more traditional hardware and software media processing products, Prosody X and Prosody S, and puts them on a leased (which is similar to borrowed) platform in the cloud. You borrow (lease) capacity on the network depending upon how many call minutes you need for your service at any one time rather than buy and maintain your own server to support the calls. We believe cloud telephony is definitely the way forward – just pay for what you need, no Capex involved. The high levels of interest we have had so far since its official launch earlier this year back up our thinking.

For more on how Aculab Cloud works you might read this earlier blog post.

Something blue

And finally, yes, we also have something blue, and we will be showing it at the exhibition – the Prosody X 1U chassis.

It is a simple idea that solves a common problem – finding a suitable platform to house the DSP-based resource boards available from Aculab. We have made it easy for you by packaging up the capabilities of Prosody X in a very cost effective 1U rack-mount chassis. Find out more here.

Come and meet the team this week at the Convergence India 2012 event in New Delhi. The event is recognised as South Asia's largest event in the ICT sector, and covers a huge range of technologies from telecommunications, through to broadcast TV and satellite services. Stop by stand L-31, Hall 11, where we will be co-exhibiting with our Indian partner Cohesive Technologies, to hear more about what Aculab can do to solve your problems with converging legacy TDM with new IP-based telecommunications networks.

We look forward to seeing you there.

21-23 March 2012.
Come and meet us at stand L-31, Hall 11.

Andrew Nicholson