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Incumbent carriers today face many challenges. On one hand they must make effective and economic use of their existing legacy facilities while reducing the cost of their operations. On the other hand, they must continually and rapidly develop new revenue streams. Incumbents face strong competition from next-gen carriers and must work hard to retain customers through the introduction of new enhanced services.
Convedia Media Server in a Service Offload Deployment There are two ways of deploying enhanced services with legacy infrastructure. The simplest of the deployment options is "Service Offload". As the diagram shows, this means connecting an application server and a media server to the PSTN using a media gateway and a softswitch (or a combined gateway). In this way, any of the many enhanced services available from VoIP Application Server vendors can be delivered to users in the PSTN. A more evolved option is "Trunk-Side" deployment, which can be used by carriers that have already put in place a VoIP trunking network as a way to cap their TDM trunking. The diagram below shows an application server and a media server being connected to the VoIP trunking network, allowing, as with Service Offload, any service to be delivered to any PSTN user.
Convedia Media Server in a
Trunk-Side Deployment
Both Service Offload and Trunk-Side deployment options serve to cap the existing legacy PSTN equipment and grow instead on the VoIP network side, while, at the same time, allowing full interworking between old and new. This "cap and grow" reduces capital expenditures, because VoIP equipment is more efficient and less expensive than TDM equipment, while reducing operating expenditures through the operational simplicity gained from a single, flexible network infrastructure for all services. Among the new voice services that incumbents can offer to their customers are Class 4 (routing-related) services, IP Centrex, voicemail, card services (e.g., prepaid, postpaid), business conferencing (scheduled, on-demand, and instant), and call center (automatic call distribution) services. All of these services make use of a media server for processing audio streams, under the control of a softswitch or application server. Here are some examples of how each of the media server's capabilities—also called building blocks—are used by the services:
IP Centrex, as with the other services, can be deployed using Service Offload or Trunk-Side. However, IP Centrex typically interconnects customers with both PSTN and IP access. Thus, the IP Centrex service model approaches a next-generation network deployment. For all these service options, multiple softswitches and application servers can control the same media server, and can do so, simultaneously, through any mix of control protocols such as MGCP, SIP, and Megaco. Also for all the options, the media servers can be deployed at the edge of the network, in the core of the network, or in a combination of the two, depending on factors such as traffic volume and the cost of carrying traffic across the network.
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