At Gitex for the first time, Ashpool Telecom plc, world-wide providers of Low Cost Telecoms equipment and solutions, releases SoftCall VoIP

Supporting H.323 and SIP, the addition of VoIP capability is designed to offer operators VoIP transit, PSTN to VoIP and VoIP to PSTN services. Richard Ramsey, Sales Manager prepaid solutions said "The addition of VoIP to our SoftCall technology provides operators full flexibility when selecting the best, and most cost effective, method of interconnect as well as opening up the burgeoning market for end-user IP connectivity. Moreover, we can now offer traditional TDM circuit-switched operators a migration path to a managed IP network infrastructure to deliver integrated voice services. As emerging economies implement IP infrastructure VoIP telephony will enable fixed line services to be deployed at far lower costs than traditional TDM and Gitex in Dubai is an excellent forum for Ashpool to announce this addition to our SoftCall technology."

SoftCall host based call control technology: by moving the call processing from the traditional add-in card into the host PC itself, the cost of the hardware can be dramatically reduced. The magnitude of this saving on the overall system cost largely depends on the application - in commodity applications (such as prepaid calling cards) the savings will be large, but in specialised and custom applications the savings are likely to be relatively small (as the software cost tends to dominate in such a system anyway). Also, quite apart from the cost savings, there are benefits in increased flexibility (no custom hardware to reconfigure) and the potential to simplify the physical equipment used and spares held.

For these reasons, it appears that host-based Call Processing has come of age, and is already capable of replacing dedicated hardware in many applications. And, with the ever-increasing power of the modern PC, the benefits of replacing the specialised hardware with a software alternative are sure to become increasingly clear.

Ashpool Telecom have supplied a number of host-based call processing systems in the past few years, and in every case the results have been indistinguishable (except in terms of cost) from hardware-based systems.

Case Study

An overseas customer with more than 1,200 ports of existing hardware-based systems (used for prepaid Calling Cards) required a major capacity boost, adding a further 1,440 ports to the system. The cost of the expansion using hardware-based cards was prohibitive, and the customer insisted that all new ports must operate identically to the older (hardware-based) systems. To meet the cost constraint, a SoftCall host-based approach was used, and even increased the number of calls processed by each PC in the overall system. As part of the upgrade, several host-based SS7 signalling controllers were installed; previously these had required extremely specialised hardware and had presented the customer with a real problem of spares and standby units. However, by using the identical make and model for every PC in the system, this issue was overcome - any PC could be used in place of any other, simply by changing the program that was automatically run on start-up.

Ashpool's LCT technology is a powerful, open and fully scalable turnkey solution for prepaid and post-paid telephony applications both account based and calling card. Designed to enable operators to meet market challenges in the increasingly competitive global prepaid calling card and prepaid mobile business, LCT SoftCall delivers exceptional service levels in each area of operation.