Based in London, Hipcom specializes in the provision Brind says Hipcom found that 90% of the carriers with which of high-quality hosted IP telephony solutions. It sells these so- Hipcom interconnects also have Nex Tone in their networks. lutions via a network of channel partners in the UK and is sup- And that cinched the deal. Only the Nex Tone Multiprotocol ported by a range of strategic partnerships with leading world- Session Controller (MSC) met Hipcom’s business and network wide VoIP vendors. challenges head on; it supports both Class 4 and Class 5 call
In that vein, Hipcom is a distributor and reseller for BroadSoft, routing, and it is interoperability-tested with BroadSoft. The a VoIP application software provider for the delivery of host- NexTone MSC provides network operators with a comprehen-ed telephony and multimedia services. BroadSoft’s flagship sive facility to manage all aspects of network interconnects for Broad Works technology enables PBX, IP Centrex, mobile PBX, real-time services, including subscriber policies, service con-business trunking and residential broadband services to be fully nectivity, and traffic management. integrated into a single hosted communications platform. In the summer of 2005, Hipcom started to bring in Nex Tone,
“Since we are a distributor and reseller for BroadSoft, we and tested both the demand side and the extension side for NAT made the decision that we wanted to build our own platform transversal and other functions. Brind recalls the process going without putting in any TDM [Time- quickly because all the feature sets were Division Multiplexing] in our network,” ...Hipcom found “right there on the box.” Hipcom staff says James Brind, technical architect at that whereas most engineers were sent to a training course Hipcom. “Because we didn’t have a need to learn the platform thoroughly. for that, we assessed that a session border vendors claimed During the month-long gear-up phase, controller was the way to go.” they provided both a number of checks and call flows were When Hipcom went looking for a ses- performed. What Brind calls “a couple sion border controller (SBC) solution to call routing and of little patches” were provided and in-support its new VoIP service offering, it BroadSoft interop- stalled by NexTone engineers, and the had some very specific requirements in platform was readied. Hipcom deployed mind. The company needed a carrier- erability, in real- its first BroadSoft NexTone customer in grade SBC platform that could meet its ity they would be September 2005. demands for both Class 4 and Class 5 Since deployment, NexTone has up-call routing and something that was in- strong in one or the graded its software from a Solaris-based teroperability-tested with the BroadSoft other but not both. Version 3 to a Linux-based Version 4. BroadWorks VoIP application server, Brind says this change to an open plat-which it was deploying as part of its VoIP infrastructure. form “gave us improved throughput and tighter integration
“Weevaluatedanumberofcompeting SBCsolutions,” Brindsays. with BroadSoft,” which, as it turns out, has also been moving He notes that Hipcom found that whereas most vendors claimed over to a Linux-based infrastructure. they provided both call routing and BroadSoft interoperability, “Version 4 is giving us greater flexibility and rapid entry in in reality they would be strong in one or the other but not both. introducing new services,” Brind explains.
Brind says that Hipcom came to the realization that the And as for the big picture several months after installation, BroadSoft solution needed detection capability in order to di- Brind is unequivocal: “The advantage of Nex Tone is we can gest all the registrations that were coming in. “We saw the ex- move traffic around very easy and manage the quality of our tension-side features that were needed,” says Brind, adding that routes better than we could with a competitor SBC.” V since he and his colleagues already knew several carriers that were using session management tools and solutions from the Russell Shaw is our Features Editor. He is also author of the Gaithersburg, Maryland-based VoIP solutions specialist Nex Tone book, Wireless Networking Made Easy. You can reach him at Communications, they started looking into NexTone as well. rshaw@vonmag.com.
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