PARIS, France - October 21, 1997 - Cisco Systems, Inc. today announced the first phase of adata/voice/video integration strategy that will ultimately encompass all aspects of enterpriseand service provider infrastructures. Aimed at enterprise wide-area networking, today'sannouncement includes a systems and technology strategy, new products and future productdirections. With these new capabilities, Cisco's enterprise customers can integrate theirwide-area voice and data communications for cost savings, increased performance and seamlesscommunications management.
The strategy includes details of how Cisco can help users network and interoperate voice overFrame Relay, voice over ATM and voice over IP from smaller access locations to larger backbonesites and across private leased and public service infrastructures.
"With voice over ATM and voice over Frame Relay becoming mainstream, Cisco now has the solutionthat takes advantage of these technologies without forcing users to build separate networks,"said John P. Morency, director of the Network Industry Practice for The Registry, Inc. "Givenits large market share in both the Internet and enterprise backbones, Cisco is well positionedto effectively create a very broad market for voice over IP in a very short time."
New products announced today include voice modules for the Cisco 3600 series and ATM circuitemulation capabilities for the Catalyst. 5500 series. The voice modules for the widelydeployed Cisco 3600 family provide four analog voice ports each, up to three modules per systemfor 12 ports total. The voice modules support 64-kbps PCM and 8-kbps CS-ACELP compression foreach channel, including fax demodulation, voice activity detection and echo cancellation. Voice switching is supported through channel associated-signaling and DTMF dialed digitdetection.
The circuit emulation module for the Catalyst 5500 family complements the circuit emulationcapabilities on the Tag Switching providingintegration, scalability and performance across both technologies in seamless networks. (Ciscodemonstrated voice over a Tag-Switched IP/ATM network at Telecom Geneva in September and atNetworld+Interop in Atlanta earlier this month.) At the network edge, voice is optionallycompressed and then adapted from its native PCM into standard IP or Frame Relay packets or ATMcells. It is then transported across Cisco's wide variety of user-to-network technologies into the backbone infrastructure. A Cisco backbone is not required, but will yield more consistentvoice quality because of the advanced quality of service (QoS) and traffic managementcapabilities within Cisco backbone systems.
Cisco's technology strategy for data/voice/video integration is to use only standards-basedimplementations where available, and standards-proposed implementations where the standards areunder development. Key standards implemented and under development are:
- G.729 -CS-ACELP voice compression @ 8 kbps per channel
- FRF 11/12-Voice over Frame Relay, call setup, segmentation
- RFC 1483-Multiprotocol over ATM
- RFC 1490-Multiprotocol over Frame Relay
- RSVP (IETF Draft)-QoS over IP for data flows
- G.723.1-Interoperable voice-over-IP audio codes
- H.323-Interoperable audio and videoconferencing over IP
- AF-SAA-0032-ATM Forum Circuit Emulation Service Interoperability
Other strategic technologies implemented by Cisco are voice over IP, in which Cisco is takingan active role toward standardization, and voice activity detection (VAD), a technique forreducing voice bandwidth by halting traffic generation during silence. Cisco is also taking aleadership role in the development of standards and ultimate implementation of full QoScapabilities over IP, which would then be introduced as a software upgrade to most Ciscosystems.
Cisco Offers Complete Portfolio for Integration of Data/Voice/Video
Cisco recently introduced additional new products and capabilities to address the need forintegrating data/voice/video traffic on customer networks. Designed for regional and branchoffice locations, the Cisco 3800 access concentrator is a multiservice Frame Relay and ATMintegrated access solution in a single platform. Announced earlier this year, " + name +""; }); } //////////////End - Executives Landing Page Hot Fixes /////////////