VoIP

A Lower Cost ATA

ISPs rolling out VoIP services complain that CPE cost is the biggest problem. One company has a simple solution.

by ISP-Planet Staff [November 15, 2004]

Amherst, N.Y.-based VOCAL Technologies has announced a significant reduction in the cost of ATAs, commonly used to provide residential and SOHO customers with VoIP (while more complex systems server larger businesses).

Victor Demjanenko, VOCAL's CTO, explains that Moore's Law has taken care of the problem. "You don't need both a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) and a RISC processor," he says. "DSPs have gone over time from being focused only on signal processing to being processors that can do control processing as well. By choosing an appropriate DSP for the device, we can do the echo cancellation, run the network OS, do TCP/IP and SIP, and RTP, all on the DSP."

All of that translates into significant cost savings. "Compared to a TI or Broadcom solution or design based around those chipsets, you save about $8, which is about one-quarter of the price, when you consider that the price is going down to nearly $25 from almost $35," says Demjanenko.

It's designed for large customers that are also cutting costs through automation. "It's for large ISPs, MSPs, anybody who wants to offer Internet telephony," he says. "Some key features for large scale deployments include remote provisioning and remote upgrades."

VOCAL has produced a reference design and Demjanenko expects the first products based on its chipset and reference design to be on the market in January, 2005.

—End