US West Inc says it will begin a technical trial of Advanced In telligent Network Release 1.0 software and hardware configurati ons in October. The trial is part of a larger initiative to re duce development time. The trial is being heralded as the first by a regional Bell company to test Advanced Intelligent Network, AIN, configurations using the AIN Release 1.0 specifications issued by Bell Communications Research, the Baby Bells’ jointly owned telecommunications laboratory in May. The trial will in clude use of an adjunct computer as an alternative means of delivering new customer services with existing telephone switch ing equipment. AIN is a set of specifications developed by the telecommunications industry and published by Bell Communications Research, in which US West is one of the shareholders. When de ployed, AIN will enable the development of a wide range of new telecommunications capabilities and services. The trial, which will run into next year, is to be managed by Boulder, Colorado based US West Advanced Technologies, the company’s applied res earch and development arm, for US West Communications Inc. No details were given as to the format or timing of possible future services that might be developed using the AIN software and hardware configurations being tested. US West is currently wor king with five industry partners on the Boulder trial. NEC Am erica is to provide an adjunct environment, running on a Sequoia Systems Inc fault-tolerant Unix computer supplied by Hewlett Packard Co, to interact with embedded digital phone exchanges.
AT&T 5ESS, Ericsson AXE switch
The trial will begin in October using an AT&T Co 5ESS switch and will continue into 1992, adding an Ericsson AXE exchange, a Nor thern Telecom Ltd DMS-100 switch, and a recommissioned AT&T 1AESS switch to the trial’s AIN network. No customers will be involved in the trial. US West will connect the adjunct environment to all four trial switches to provide an execution environment for five test services. These include Cancel Call Waiting; Transfer to Voice Messaging; Automatic Call Back; Improved Three-Way Calling; and Customer Usage Information. US West Advanced Technologies developed the test services specifically for the trial, as well as the Feature Manager software used to manage the interactions between adjunct-based service features. The 5ESS switch is AT&T’s advanced digital switching system for speech and data telecommunications, which the company claims has over 40m lines in service in 15 countries. AT&T Bell Laboratories and AT&T Network Systems staff have been working with US West on-site to develop and implement the interface between the 5ESS switch and the adjunct, as well as the call model within the 5ESS switch for call processing. AT&T will provide the necessary operations, administration, maintenance and provisioning for the switch to support the first Rapid Service Delivery trial. The Ericsson AXE is a modular digital switching system, claimed to have some 35m installations in 81 countries. This is being evolved to support the Advanced Intelligent Network in different configurations and, as part of this evolution, the AXE will support US West’s Rapid Service Delivery concept. NEC America’s Switching Systems Division will provide the adjunct-based portion of the high speed switch-to-adjunct interface, and the computing environment, and a Hewlett-Packard 9000 Model 1245 Unix box will be the hardware- operating system environment. The NEC architecture includes switch-to-adjunct message set, Service Manager, Data Manager, Fault, Configuration, Accounting and other OSS functionalities. The adjunct is networked with NEC’s Service Creation Environment to deploy the services planned for the trial. Northern Telecom will provide advanced intelligent network capabilities on its DMS-100 telephone exchanges. The AIN Release 1 trial, says US West, is the result of two years of joint specification and design efforts by US West Advanced Technologies, Northern Telecom and Northern’s research and development arm in Canada, Bell Northern Researc
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