Verizon takes next big step toward VoIP

摘要

Best known locally for its spring tulip festival, the small northwest Washington city of Mount Vernon now has a new claim to fame: the first central office in Verizon's network to be converted from old-fashioned circuit switching to cutting-edge packet telephony The setup within the Skagit Valley facility doesn't look much different than it did before the conversion, part of a $1 billion-plus nationwide project that Verizon estimates will take five or six years to complete. The central piece of new equipment, a Nortel Softswitch outfitted with add-ons to support legacy TDM intercon- nections, takes up about as much space as the 7-foot-high, 19-inch-wide Class 5 circuit switch it re-placed. The most visible change is that the new gear flashes with green lights, whereas the Class 5 cabinets were"closed up and pretty mundane," says a network operations supervisor at the facility But the most significant difference is what you can't see: a platform that promises to generate increased revenue through support of new converged services while slashing capital and operational costs by up to 50%.