Lucent Technologies Inc is shipping its Internet Telephony Servers, a Microsoft NT-based server and software bundle marketed at corporates, and a Unix based set of hardware and software marketed at large internet service providers. The servers can be used to direct phone calls over the Wide Area Network, using IP rather than dedicated phone circuits. Lucent pre-announced its intentions to get into this market back in April (CI No 3,130). Lucent is using its own elemedia voice compression codecs for the products, and has lined up some big players, such as MCI Corp, France Telecom SA, GTE Corp and a number of internet service providers to hold technology trials, and a number of internet service providers. The package aimed at corporate customers plugs into a Private Branch Exchange, and is comprised of a Compaq Computer Corp Proliant 2500 Intel server running Windows NT and the custom designed Lucent server software. The bundle also includes combined speech processing, and PSTN interface cards from Natural Microsystems Corp. The server can hold eight cards, which gives support for 24 E1 interfaces on a fully loaded server. If Lucent’s elemedia Codecs are used at 10Kbps of bandwidth per voice channel, this works out at 150 concurrent calls. The server is shipping now costs $64,000 in a full configuration. The Unix telephony server includes specialized software, and voice cards that could be added to existing Unix servers to provide large internet service providers with IP telephony capabilities.
