Home office voip

Byline: Vince Vittore

Next week's Voice on the Net and Fast Net Futures shows in Santa Clara, Calif., are expected to be the biggest editions yet of the events and should provide attendees a snapshot of an industry in flux as vendors continue pushing into new markets. If a theme can be garnered from the trickle of pre-show news, it's that the definition of residential and business services slowly is being erased.

Siemens Subscriber Networks group, for instance, will unveil a new series of integrated access devices (IAD) aimed at both the small office/home office user and the mid-level enterprise.

"The market is really the dental office or the small insurance office," said Pat Fitzgerald, vice president of marketing for SSN.

The new products, which support four Ethernet ports and up to eight POTS lines, are part of the company's continued migration into the fringes of the network, said Paul Reitmeier, president of SSN.

"We see the problem that's occurred in how [carriers] extend new services into the enterprise without having to make it so cumbersome and complex," he said.

The IADs will continue flowing through the carrier sales channel, a recognition that even with improvements in self-installation software, most users are better served when a relatively complex customer premises device comes from the service provider.

"These devices will require a level of back-end support management," Reitmeier said.

The new SpeedStream devices also may mark the beginning of a move by the traditional telecom vendor toward the triple-play market. In a residential deployment, the IADs all have built-in routing capability and feasibly could be used to route video. Additionally, the group is starting to look at IP set-top boxes that may include some VoIP capabilities.

"We are tabbed with the research budget and we will come forward with a set-top box," Reitmeier said.

If and when that product hits the market, Siemens will be joining an increasingly crowded field. Thomson, perhaps best known as a set-top box vendor, last week used CeBit in Hanover, Germany, to introduce a series of VoIP products.

In other pre-show news from VON, chip vendor Legerity will launch a series of silicon designed to voice-enable DLCs and DSLAMs. The introduction will be part of a larger architectural shift that the company plans to unveil at the show. The new chip sets come at a time when European carriers are increasing their deployment of DSLAMs, said Rick Beal, director of marketing for network access solutions at Legerity. In the U.S. market, the push is more focused on DLCs, he added.

"We think this is the year that the momentum [toward VoIP] is really shifting," he said.