TMCnet News
U.S. Cable MSOs Rally International Support for VoIP-Enabling StandardBy ROBERT LIU
TMCnet Wireless and Technology Columnist CableLabs, the non-profit research and development consortium representing the largest cable multiple system operators (MSO) in the U.S., on Thursday announced that it has won the approval of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to specify its PacketCable 1.5 specifications as a new suite of international standards.
Known internationally as IPCablecom, the new standard was approved back in November and sets forth the architecture for voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) on Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications (DOCSIS) – the industry standard for cable modem data transport. PacketCable 1.5 includes a set of integrated protocol interfaces for network call signaling (NCS), call management server (CMS) to CMS signaling, quality of service (QoS), support for multimedia and other functions necessary to provide time-critical interactive services over a cable television network using IP. According to officials, the latest milestone represented a significant improvement from CableLabs’ previous attempts to rally the ITU’s support behind PacketCable 1.0, which was released in 1999, and brought to the international standards body a number of years back.
“Unlike 1.5, we took it to the ITU in pieces,” explained Ed Miller, Vice President of Advanced Network Systems at CableLabs, referring to previous iterations.
But while PacketCable 1.5 proves to be friendlier to the widely accepted Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the latest specifications still relies on network call signaling (NCS) using the non-standard Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP) to establish sessions, meaning communications is only partially SIP-compliant up to the call management server (a.k.a. softswitch), Miller said during a telephone briefing.
“We use a different protocol called ‘NCS’ to signal the control of the MTA/CPE devices,” Miller told TMCnet. “PacketCable 2.0 is an entirely SIP-based architecture.”
PacketCable 2.0 is still in the development phase. When completed, the specification will define a modular architecture to address multimodal, multimedia services (e.g. video telephony) Fixed Mobile Convergence; and greater interoperability in general, Miller said.
In addition to the suite of 16 PacketCable 1.5 specifications that now are international standards, the ITU also standardized on specifications from CableLabs’s other ongoing projects: DOCSIS and the CableHome project.
The ITU is the United Nations specialized agency in the field of telecommunications.
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is arguably the single most important technological development for VoIP since the proliferation of Internet Protocol itself. See what all the buzz is about at the SIP Workshop taking place at INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & Expo, EAST, which runs January 24-27, 2006, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.
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