Monday, January 12, 2004
Texas Instruments has taken a big step toward making its silicon a major player in the emerging last-mile voice-over-IP (VoIP) market, announcing that it has inked a joint development agreement with VoIP service provider Vonage. Under terms of the deal, which was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show today (Jan. 9), TI and Vonage will collaborate on the development of a combined VoIP hardware/software platform optimized for Vonage's residential and business services.
While many have scoffed at delivering VoIP connection to the home and corporations, Vonage has found way to gain momentum for its last-mile VoIP services around the country. To date, Vonage has relied on Cisco's ATA186 and Motorola's VT1000 VoIP to make these services come to life. But, to continue to expand its reach and options for customers, Vonage wanted to increase the amount of manufacturers developing gateways for its services, said Matthew Deatrick, vice president of retail sales for the Edison, N.J.-based service provider.
The challenge for Vonage was picking the right strategy for enabling multiple vendors to build gateways. To answer this challenge, Vonage decided to go to "the source", as Deatrick called it, and work with a single silicon provider that could build a platform multiple OEMs and ODMs could roll out. Since TI's VoIP solution lied at the heart of both the Cisco and Motorola boxes, Vonage knew where to turn. "One of the main reasons we turned to TI is because all of the systems we have in the field now use TI's chipsets," Deatrick said.
Now, TI has the challenge to craft a VoIP hardware/software platform that is optimized for Vonage's services. According to Director of Product Management Debbie Greenstreet, TI will tap into existing signal processing and software portfolio to develop the Vonage-based solution. Greenstreet said TI will also work with Vonage to adapt portions of the platform to handle call setup, call forwarding, network address translation (NAT), and other procedures specific to Vonage's service.
TI's Greenstreet remained quiet on the specific processor that the platform will be implemented around and the specific tweaks that need to be made. She did say, however, that the first solution from the partnership should hit the market by mid-year.
Vonage is also planning for a mid-year rollout. Deatrick said that Vonage hopes to have TI's platform in OEM and ODM systems by the second quarter, if not sooner. "If we're going to complete and stay ahead, we have to quickly get this technology in equipment manufacturer hands," Deatrick said.
By: DocMemory
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