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Engine Softswitch leads the way

Engine Softswitch, Ericsson's packet-switched solution for fixed telephony and multimedia, is proving to be a winning solution. Research by telecommunications consulting firm Dittberner Associates shows Ericsson is the clear industry leader for sales of Voice-over-Packet (VoP) ports.

May 28, 2004

Ericsson supplied over 21 percent of the estimated 51 million VoP ports (31.4 million media gateway ports and 19.6 million softswitch ports) that have been installed in public networks worldwide as of the fourth quarter 2003. In the Class 4/5 category, Ericsson dominates with almost 56 percent of the total.


Engine Softswitch is used for migrating circuit-switched systems to multi-service networks and for introducing new SIP based services such as video telephony and IP centrex. Marketing manager Henrik Bäckström says its success is down to its high quality and modern architecture. "The application for Class 4 has been in commercial operation for over two years and has shown availability figures well above 99,999 percent," he says.

"Some of the most important customers are TeliaSonera, Telstra, Telenor, Telecom Egypt, Telmex and BCC in China. It is fully interoperable with all existing legacy services and has proven carrier-class performance and reliability levels."

It is a very efficient solution for both transit and local applications and although local deployments are rather new in the Softswitch area, Ericsson already has solutions in service for customers such as Telmex, TeliaSonera and Tunisie Telecom.

Not only does Engine Softswitch provide for both local and transit applications, but it has interconnect advantages as well. A number of protocols (SIP, SIP-T and H.323) have been developed to allow it to interconnect with other networks, such as Voice over IP networks.

"These features are important for operators because it enables them to more efficiently make money on the interconnect business," Bäckström says.

The multimedia part of the Softswitch is based on the IMS standard, defined by 3GPP. This technology will be the cornerstone for fixed to mobile convergence and Ericsson is also developing mobile applications, such as push-to-talk, on the standard.