November 10, 2004 Foxboro, MA -- Telco Systems has broadened its end-to-end FTTH "triple play" prospects to include independent telephone companies, utilities, and municipalities through the introduction of the EdgeGate CPE GW-482 VoIP Media Gateway. The new extended-temperature gateway, part of the company's "Active Ethernet FTTH solution," is available as either an outdoor unit or indoor customer premises device. The outdoor model is pre-configured in an environmentally controlled enclosure for mounting on the outside of a building or home for service provider access.
According to David Lee, vice president, marketing, at Telco Systems, the EdgeGate CPE GW-482 "was developed by building on the field-proven technology of our EdgeGate CPE GW-282 series, which is currently deployed at thousands of homes and small business worldwide. We developed this new lower-cost solution for service providers who may not need the full feature set of the original EdgeGate CPE."
"It's the ideal solution for open access applications in which multiple service providers are involved in providing VoIP voice service, video and high-speed Internet access," said Irit Gillath, vice president of IP product management for Telco Systems. "To meet this need, the new EdgeGate CPE GW-482 is configurable with or without voice or internal routing capabilities."
The EdgeGate CPE GW-482 supports various combinations of 0, 2, or 4 analog voice lines (VoIP FXS ports) and up to 16 10/100Base-TX Ethernet ports (the basic unit supports eight ports). The optical uplink can be configured with either a Fast or Gigabit Ethernet transceiver, and supports either a single bi-directional fiber, which can cut fiber costs in half, or traditional fiber pair.
The EdgeGate CPE GW-482 has full wire-speed Layer 2 switching and Layer 3 IP routing capabilities, allowing for better quality of service (QoS), better service type differentiation, and improved services for video streaming and VoIP. It provides high-quality voice using enhanced Layer 3 QoS mechanisms such as TOS, rate limiting, and traffic shaping, as well as 802.1p for voice priority, 802.1q VLAN tagging. It supports all major VoIP protocols (including SIP, MGCP, and H.323), as well as T.38 for fax over IP. The platform has gone through interoperability certification with what Telco Systems called "leading softswitch providers."
For video services, the EdgeGate CPE GW-482 supports IGMPv2 (including a snooping feature for video streaming support) to allow the service provider to offer IP video. Analog video is also supported.
EdgeGate CPE GW-482's modular architecture simplifies field maintenance of the outdoor unit, virtually eliminating the need to haul the unit away if repair is needed, the company asserts. Battery backup with recharging system and lifeline POTS support are designed to guarantee that telephone service will stay up in emergency situations when external power fails. It also provides mass upgrade and configuration tools using TFTP server, so that upgrade and configuration changes can be done automatically in mass deployment. The system supports the spanning tree protocol, which provides high redundancy and availability in a ring network architecture even when using real-time applications such as voice.
When used in conjunction with Telco Systems' T5 Compact IP aggregation switch and T6Pro core switch, EdgeGate CPE GW-482 provides an end-to-end FTTH suite from the central office to the customers home or office.