Dans son message, Kent W. England ecrivait:
If you are dealing with an existing voice switch, I don't think you have much choice but to handle it with that voice switch vendor's product. Third party solutions seem to have too much to do with handling call recognition to be cost effective. Both Nortel and Lucent have announced plans to deal with data calls by off-loading from the first voice switch onto a packet network. Frankly, I don't understand enough about voice switch architecture to know how well that deals with first-switch overloading, but it will certainly deal well with the inter-office trunk overloading that is prevalent in the US architecture.
I recommend exploring TR-303 technology based on Bellcore's TR-NWT-000303 specification. Everybody can do tandem trunk relief and far-end office relief now. It is the near-end office relief that is being tackled now.
data services are feasible? If not, you could always swim uphill with xDSL or cable modems. :-)
I won't get into that here ... ;-) -- Sharif Torpis (storpis@pbi.net) Network Engineering Pacific Bell Internet PGP Key at http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bal/pks-toplev.html