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There is so much and so little changing about the softswitch at the same time that it's almost a paradox. The softswitch is becoming more important to the realization of the next generation network because its long-awaited adoption has finally arrived and it is helping to drive the market. At the same time, the softswitch is becoming less important as most vendors — except perhaps Nortel Networks — try to distance themselves from the term altogether.

You may have noticed by now that you haven't heard much about the softswitch this week. You've undoubtedly heard a lot about IMS (the IP Multimedia Subsystem) — a concept and burgeoning standard whose recent embrace by analysts and press (with a lot of help from vendors who want to be out in front as IMS thought leaders) its creators find hilarious.

IMS, a standard developed for the wireless industry by 3GPP, still needs a lot of work to become the enabling model for convergence. Yet softswitch vendors are speaking of their technology less in terms of products and more as components and services enabled by IMS. Perhaps the biggest trend in softswitching today is simply how people talk about it.

Nortel does not shy away from the term softswitch. In fact, its CS2000 is known as a Superclass softswitch because it can be used in any voice or communications application and supports both traditional Class 4 and Class 5 features.

In current trials, Nortel is trying to take convergence a step beyond wireless/wireline network and service convergence or TDM and IP functionality to include the enterprise.

“It goes above and beyond the basic softswitch,” said Rob Scheible, senior marketing manager at Nortel. “We will provide the capability so that when people move from the office to home or go on the road, their voice and multimedia services move right along with them.”

This week, Nortel made its CS2000 Superclass softswitch even more super by integrating multimedia capabilities from its MCS5200 multimedia application server. Nortel's long-term goal is to create an infrastructure that helps carriers serve one another's customers; it will be aware of who each customer is, understand what their requirements are and support them wherever they happen to be.

“If you need a terabit of bandwidth and you're not in your home network, you'll still be able to get it because the network will recognize you, verify your requirements with your home network an deliver it. That's the kind of network we're working to evolve,” Scheible said.

Going super won't keep Nortel from serving the smaller operator. The company also demonstrated the CS2000 running on a CompactPCI platform, a smaller form factor that still combines voice-over-IP (VoIP) and TDM functionality. It also recently rolled out residential VoIP capabilities for its DMS10 remote switch.

Only in telecom would getting called classless be a good thing, and it would seem the opposite of a Superclass switch, but it isn't. The classless softswitch that Tekelec discussed this week doesn't lack Class 4 and Class 5 functionality; it simply makes no distinctions between them. Nor does it make a distinction between VoIP and TDM nor wireline and wireless.

The recent growth of the MVNO is an example of how important wireless will be to wireline operators. “It opens a whole new ballgame for those providers that were pigeon-holed as wireline providers. They don't all want to own a wireless infrastructure, but they want to have a wireless play,” said Paul Miller, vice president of product line management for switching for Tekelec.

Tekelec is using the feature server portion of its softswitch solution to build wireless business services that can be delivered over GSM, CDMA, Wi-Fi, wired SIP or TDM, because, as Miller said, service providers want to make sure they own the features and the customers, which have a variety of access technologies.

Tekelec has worked aggressively on integrating its recently acquired feature server into its switching architecture. “We think an architecture with a softswitch and a feature server being separate but integrated elements allows us to more rapidly deliver features and be more creative in how we deliver those features,” Miller said. “And it works the same way IMS sees the architecture.”

Miller said the IMS is more of a way to show operators how to deploy services. “Our position is about building services for our customers based on IMS, not in selling them an IMS infrastructure and hoping services come later,” he said.

Lucent has been actively trying to move the discussion away from the softswitch and toward a broader discussion of the functional elements of IMS. The term softswitch conjures images of an emulated circuit switch, and that's not what it's about, said Mike Cooper, director of global marketing and strategy for Lucent's convergence solutions group.

Any softswitch technology put in the network has to be compatible with IMS, plain and simple, Cooper said. And where a softswitch focuses on voice control, an IMS is focused on any application with any access technology, he added.

Cooper sees a huge emphasis on multimedia and interworking with wireline and wireless networks, even Wi-Fi and WiMAX. “Wireless providers in certain regions want to get access to the Wi-Fi spectrum transparently to gain synergies in QOS and higher bandwidth. And wireline providers want access to gain some amount of mobility in their space,” he said.

To that end, Lucent demonstrated this week a more hardened version of the new Session Manager product it introduced last year. “We are setting up a single solution through a set of common elements for both wireless and wireline providers, which evolved from our softswitch assets,” Cooper said.

Sonus Networks feels lucky that it hasn't really had to evolve anything. “We spent a lot of time defending our choice, and the trend toward a distributed model and now IMS is a vindication of the Sonus model,” said Bruce Trvalik, director of IMS strategy for Sonus.

That's why Sonus stressed this week the fundamentals of IMS and the potential of presence and session initiation protocol (SIP — last year's IMS in terms of hot phrases). It also talked about the growing importance of bundling.

Whether its called bundling, the classless switch or the SuperClass switch, it means there needs to be one solution consisting of the necessary IMS components that serves any carrier for any service consumed by customers using any network access type.

“And that's just the start of the story,” Trvalik said.

MetaSwitch, whose story only recently included dis-aggregating its softswitch architecture, has been focusing on interoperability among both its newly distributed components as well as other vendors. This week it signed interoperability agreements with several media gateway vendors.

The company also introduced a new media gateway product, and its parent company, Data Connections, introduced software-based session border control technology, some of which MetaSwitch will adopt.

Melding parts or all of SBC technology into the softswitch is already occurring, and judging from discussions with these five softswitch vendors, that is likely to accelerate.

“Don't sell your shares in the SBC vendors yet; they have a long road ahead. But you will see the media processing portion move into the edge gateways and some of the call state pieces move into the softswitch,” said Andy Randall, vice president of marketing for MetaSwitch.

MetaSwitch also has an IMS story, but it won't be abandoning its standalone softswitch. As for the distributed model required by IMS? “We had always planned on scaling up to a distributed architecture,” Randall said. “However, after supporting VoIP for three years in the access network, it was clear to MetaSwitch that the standard still needed a lot of work.”

He echoed the sentiment that wireless/wireline convergence is on the move and that IMS is the technology everyone is looking at to get there. “However, it's no panacea. It's more of a recipe book. But everything we have done architecturally sits within IMS.”

And that's where the story of the softswitch will be told, within the framework of IMS.

The cable industry isn't selling VoIP per se — they call it digital phone or digital telephony, but cable players are nonetheless expected to capture a significant part of the VoIP market. According to In-Stat analyst Michael Paxton, 3.3 million households worldwide are projected to use cable VoIP, with most of that concentrated in North America.

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