Business SIP Services For PacketCable
Overview
The success enjoyed by many cable operators in deploying PacketCable telephony to their residential customers means that this market is beginning to approach saturation. With their hard-won experience in the residential telephony space, cable operators are now in an excellent position to address the needs of the under-served business markets in their footprints – and this represents the next major opportunity for growing their voice service revenues.
Addressing the business market requires cable operators to tackle significant new challenges. New technologies must be mastered, since business customers expect a SIP-based offering that brings them the benefits of the latest business IP phones. And of course new approaches to marketing and product development are needed to define the right services and to successfully reach the customer base.
The Metaswitch solution for Business SIP Services addresses both of these needs. Metaswitch has brought its years of experience in the telco business VoIP market to the cable world, making a major contribution to the development of the PacketCable Business SIP Services specification and adapting its hosted PBX solution to the specific needs of the cable market. And with its MarketVisions program, Metaswitch can help cable operators to define products that precisely target the needs of business customers in their footprints, and reach out successfully to that market.
Features And Benefits
- Feature sets that emulate both key systems and PBXs, enabling cable operators to meet the needs of all types and sizes of business customers
- Interoperability with a wide range of SIP business phones, giving business customers an excellent choice of price points and feature sets to meet their precise needs
- Automated remote management of configuration and firmware in SIP business phones, taking the pain out of mass phone deployment and maximizing service availability to business users
- Self-service configuration of features such as auto-attendant, hunt groups and pickup groups via CommPortal’s easy to use Web interface provides businesses with immediate control over their services
- CommPortal applications including Widgets and CommPortal Assistant help maximize user productivity by providing quick and easy access to the most often used telephony functions
- Optional applications running on selected business phone models to support voicemail access, contact lists and hot-desking provide even greater convenience of use
Solution Elements
The Metaswitch solution for Business SIP Services is based on the following elements:
- MetaSphere, configured with Local and Business Calling Features, Voicemail, Easy / Premium Attendant, Music-on-Hold, Session Control, Gateway Control and Lawful Intercept
- CommPortal and CommPortal Widgets, to provide the subscriber-facing Web interfaces for business SIP services
- One or more Universal Media Gateways, which may be MG2510 or MG3510 systems, and which provide both trunking gateway and media server functions
- Session Border Controllers to protect the cable operator’s VoIP network and to support PacketCable Multimedia QoS
- MetaView, configured with Service Assurance Server, SIP Provisioning Server and MetaView Web
- Interoperability with a wide range of E-MTA and trunking gateway equipment
The basic Business SIP Services solution may be enhanced with the addition of the following elements, which provide additional service features and capabilities for subscribers:
- MetaSphere applications including Conferencing, Incoming Call Manager and Live Message Screening
- CommPortal applications including CommPortal Mobile Voicemail and CommPortal Assistant
The capabilities of Business SIP Services may also be extended further to integrate mobile phones. For more details, see the Metaswitch Fixed Mobile Convergence solution.