21 June 2002 -- Lucent Technologies has deployed its Lucent Softswitch, APX 8000 and MAX TNT Universal Gateways for the France and Spain subsidiaries of Milan-based pan-European Internet service provider Tiscali SpA.
Last year Lucent signed a pan-European contract and a general purchase agreement with Tiscali to enable it to develop its European network and introduce new services. Both deployments of the Softswitch and APX 8000 have been accompanied by design, implementation and support by Lucent Technologies Worldwide Services.
The programmable Softswitch solution - part of Lucent's circuit-to-packet portfolio and the "brains" of the IP network controlling gateways and end-points using protocols such as H.248, session initiation protocol (SIP) and H.323 - is now carrying live network traffic in both countries.
The APX 8000 and MAX TNT support voice, data and fax calls on a single digital signal processor (DSP) card to provide services on any port at any time.
The deployments enable Tiscali to use the Softswitch Internet Call Diversion (ICD) solution to manage traffic. Tiscali can deploy live voice over IP (VoIP) traffic on the Softswitch and introduce IP-based services to its residential and small and medium enterprise customers.
The Softswitch is designed to meet scalability needs of large service providers and enable carriers to manage the convergence of voice and data traffic by bridging IP with the traditional circuit-based voice network using SS7 signalling. Deployment of a single, converged network will enable Tiscali to introduce multimedia services.