Omaha, Nebraska-headquartered MFS Communications Co Inc, the first company to offer a national US and international Asynchronous Transfer Mode service (CI No 2,227) has announced what it claims is another innovation. MFS Datanet, its San Jose-based operating company, will offer a service called Wide Area Voice Exchange or WAVE, over its US Asynchronous Transfer network. The service will be the first to provide voice, data and video transmission over Asynchronous Transfer Mode, claims the company. WAVE employs Variable Bit Rate technology, allocating network bandwidth capacity as needed, without having to dedicate bandwidth specifically to speech transmission as is necessary with the Constant Bit Rate employed by Time Division Multiplexing. With ATM, the network is able to adapt to the offered load, and WAVE will allow us to apply these ATM benefits to voice as well as data and video, says Doug Hickey, senior vice-president of MFS Datanet. A typical WAVE application would be to send PABX-based speech traffic and Frame Relay-based data to the same location over a single Asynchronous Mode network, said the firm. WAVE is available now in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and San Jose. Further cities will be added both domestically and internationally in 1996, said the company. MFS operates fibre optic Metropolitan Area Networks in 40 US markets, as well as in London, Paris, Stockholm and Frankfurt. It has chosen selected Mississauga, Ontario-based Northen Telecom Ltd to supply its Asynchronous Transfer Mode switching equipment for WAVE. Their selection was based primarily on the capability of Northern Telecom’s Magellan Passport to deliver a flexible and scaleable switching platform, said the service provider. The switch offers an Asynchronous Transfer Mode interface that is fully compliant with the ATM Forum’s specification, including the Forum’s provision for Variable Bit Rate, the company said.
