FREMONT, CA (September 12, 2000) — The Multiservice Switching Forum (MSF) and the International Softswitch Consortium (ISC) today announced the results of the first Megaco/H.248 Interop event held at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) last month. The phase one interop "bake-off," co-sponsored by the MSF, ISC and the UNH Interoperability Lab and hosted by Marconi, united a broad range of participating vendors, and was the first major step in validating the interoperability of the proposed Megaco/H.248 protocol standard.

The primary purpose of the three-day event was to assess the viability of the proposed Megaco/H.248 standard, while creating an environment for independent development teams to demonstrate the interoperability of their "Megaco/H.248-compliant" devices. Additionally, this event served as the starting point to kick-off the process of moving the IETF RFCs to draft standard status, which requires documentation of the interoperability of each element/feature in the protocol.

"This represents significant progress in interoperability of the Megaco/H.248 protocol standard," explained Benjamin Schultz, Managing Engineer of the UNH InterOperability Lab. (IOL). "The participating companies have shown their willingness to cooperate to establish communication between their competitors and themselves."

More than 45 people attended the MSF / ISC interop event representing 17 participating vendors, including Broadcom, Alcatel, Agilent Technologies, Nortel Networks, T!Semantics Inc, Marconi Communications, RadiSys Corporation, Hughes Software Systems, CCL/ITRI, Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory, GN Nettest, Excitele, ipDialog, Inc., RADCOM Equipment, Inc., ipGen Inc., Pernix, and Radvision.

Participating vendors tested a range of Megaco-compliant Media Gateways (MG), Media Gateway Controllers (MGCs), parsers, and test boxes.  There were a total of 6 independently developed MGCs and 11 MGs, plus three network analyzers. The "bake-off" provided a number of test scenarios that involved placing calls between two nodes of a single gateway as well as between nodes on separate gateways. All tests included tests of media flow. Most implementations used real-time protocol (RTP) on an Ethernet network, but one of the MG implementations had an ATM network for media.

"We are very pleased with the results of this first Megaco/H.248 interoperability event, as it demonstrated the successful implementation of the proposed standard by many different vendors," explained Brian Rosen, Office of the CTO, Marconi, MSF Interoperability Working Group Chair and Technical Advisory Council of the ISC. "Given the state of the protocol document, there were an extremely large number of completely independently developed implementations."

About Megaco/H.248
The convergence of data and voice networks is driving the need for a new class of network devices, commonly known as media gateways (MG). Such gateways are instrumental in streaming voice, video and data across a single network infrastructure, and require various protocols to operate. Megaco/H.248 is a newly proposed protocol standard for converged networks, and is the first to be co-developed and acknowledged by two standards bodies — the IETF and the ITU. This proposed standard is acknowledged by the IETF as Megaco, while the ITU references it as H.248.

About the ISC
The International Softswitch Consortium was launched in May 1999 to support rapid advancement of application development for the evolving Internet protocol networks which support both voice and multimedia communications. Internet protocol networks are built on distributed call control servers generally called "call agents", "media gateway controllers", "softswitches", and "media gateways". The Consortium promotes worldwide compatibility and interoperability; identifying, selecting, augmenting as appropriate, the development and distribution of standard interfaces for call agents, media gateways, and applications. More information can be found on the International Softswitch Consortium’s website at http://www.softswitch.org.

About the MSF
The Multiservice Switching Forum is an open membership organization committed to developing and promoting implementation agreements for multiservice switching systems. Formed in late 1998, the organization’s activities include promoting global development of multiservice switching system technology, promoting worldwide compatibility and interoperability, and encouraging input to appropriate national and international standards bodies. More information can be found on the MSF web site at http://www.msforum.org.

Editor’s Note: Results of this testing will be presented to the IETF and ITU who will publish the report as an Internet Draft. Contact:
Domenick Cilea
Springboard Communications
732-863-1900 ext. 102
dcilea@s-board.com