Open for Debate
Open VoB Consortium aims for interoperability
By Karen Brown
from the April 16, 2001 issue of Broadband Week
Cable has Cable Television Laboratories. DSL has the DSL Forum.
So it may seem natural that the companies working on voice over broadband also would develop their own umbrella organization to help market and develop interoperability standards for the fledgling technology.
But while that is indeed the goal of the Open Voice Over Broadband Consortium, some say the group's effectiveness is equally open for debate.
Formed last fall, Open VoB is pressing for adoption of open standards-based guidelines for voice-over-broadband, to assure that equipment from multiple vendors is interoperable.
"It's the greater good," says consortium chairman Ken Cavanaugh, director of business development for General Bandwidth Inc. "For this market to happen, you need to have some initial footing here with stuff working from an interoperability standpoint. For the integrated access device you need to have a variety of CPE devices there. Also from a test standpoint--why go do this with every other vendor? It just makes a lot of sense to go do this up front."
To that end, the group is banking on standards developed in the ATM Forum and the DSL Forum to stage "callfest." interoperability events. One such callfest was held in March and plans are to schedule such confabs quarterly, Cavanaugh says. "Basically the scope of testing will open up some more as we move along," he says. "The hope is we will start to roll that into the testing groups and the forums."
While focused for now on telco technology, Open VoB will add cable systems focusing on architectures for Class 5 switches, which link cable telephony systems to the public switched telephone network. Open VoB and CableLabs, cable's testing and interoperability consortium, have met to discuss the interface for the switch, Cavanaugh says.
"From a cable standpoint, the first part right now is to go check on the requirements again, and then we are going to look hard at it in the second quarter," he says. "The cable play is a little different for us than DSL because they have already done a lot of work. So we don't need to do that. We're not looking to go do work that has already been done."
Wireless still is a fair distance out, with work perhaps beginning at the end of this year, Cavanaugh says. The problem is, with a chaotic mix of schemes and standards, it isn't possible right now to pick a likely wireless winner.
"This is not ground to go battle standards," Cavanaugh says. "It's more at the end of the day we will basically look at it ... is there a good pool of vendors that are implementing this? It can't be just one or two."
But the consortium has not gathered the full support of the broadband industry. Several major technology players are conspicuously absent from the membership list, and some within the industry believe the group is simply duplicating efforts of existing standards bodies.
One of the companies not taking part is CopperCom Inc., and there is a simple reason for that, according to Jennifer Stagnaro, chief marketing officer. "We drove the standards in the early days with the DSL Forum and the ATM Forum," she says. "Basically, all they are doing is regurgitating what the ATM Forum and the DSL Forum are doing. It's a superfluous organization that was put together for marketing purposes."
Similarly, competitor Jetstream Communications Inc. never was asked to join the consortium, according to Stephen Gleave, vice president of marketing. But that wasn't a major concern; Jetstream has its own interoperability lab and has forged agreements with manufacturers of customer devices and other equipment vendors. Gleave also points out the ATM and DSL forums have settled on standards governing the communication between the IAD and the gateways.
"Why do we need another interop function? We looked at it and said 'At this stage in the industry, what the carriers need is help from the vendors in rolling it out--getting it in, getting it installed,'" Gleave says. "We felt we could do that by working with the carriers who we had detected were committed in rolling out service."
Gleave says he has talked to backers of Open VOB and asked for more information, but nothing yet has been forthcoming. "I don't think Open VOB has necessarily encouraged participating from the leading VoDSL vendors," he notes. "I am still open to Jetstream adding value to Open VOB, but I just don't see them actively marketing it to people like us."
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