VON – San Jose, CA and Lod, Israel – March 8, 2005 - NexTone Communications®, a market leader in scalable session management of real-time IP services, and AudioCodes (NASDAQ: AUDC), a leading provider of Voice over Packet (VoP) technologies and voice network products, today announced that NexTone has selected AudioCodes to enable a media transcoding solution for scalable and secure Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) network interconnects. NexTone’s Transcoding Media Firewall (TMF) option for its session controller platforms, enhanced with AudioCodes’ leading edge IPmedia™ Media Server blades and platforms, is now available. The solution enables NexTone’s carrier customers to simplify their VoIP networks with a robust, highly scalable, and cost-effective interconnect solution. Interconnecting today’s VoIP network domains and crossing network borders requires special peering functions for real-time communication such as transparent signaling, protocol mediation, and transcoding of media streams for voice, fax, and video that may have incompatible encoding.
“Routinely the Yankee Group interviews the world’s largest carriers, and carrier inter-connect is one area that is frequently discussed as a concern for Tier 1 carriers,” said Danny Klein, senior analyst with The Yankee Group. “NexTone and AudioCodes are joining forces and expertise to provide a market-ready solution to this very real problem."
The NexTone TMF option enables NexTone’s Session Controller to dynamically utilize AudioCodes’ media server blades and platforms with the Multimedia Services Control Protocol (MSCP) to achieve seamless transcoding of voice and fax streams.
“This solution gives carriers more control of their real-time traffic. Carriers can now standardize their VoIP networks without making expensive investments in media gateway upgrades, or sacrificing connectivity to their carrier partners or enterprise customers that use different VoIP standards,” said Dan Dearing, vice president of marketing at NexTone. “We selected AudioCodes because they provide best of breed media processing capabilities, densities, and a variety of supported vocoders all packaged and optimized for today’s evolving networks.”
AudioCodes platforms recently achieved outstanding Voice Quality results at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) third Speech Quality Test Event. Voice quality is essential for VoIP to continue expanding and being deployed in the most demanding networks and is particularly important at the edge of the network for inter-connection functions.
“We believe that NexTone’s best of breed session border controller integrated with AudioCodes’ transcoding capabilities provides carriers with the most cost effective and robust way to interconnect and scale their networks,” said Lior Aldema, vice president of marketing at AudioCodes. “We are pleased to be part of a solution that provides carriers with a means to facilitate the exchange of carrier traffic and also enables the wide-spread deployment of VoIP services to the enterprise and consumer markets.”
