Carriers Have Been Using VoIP in Softswitch Implementations Since 1999

The carrier telephone network has been organized in a hierarchical manner to ensure efficiency in handling the large volume of calls that originate and terminate in the local area and to provide limited network resources for only that fraction of calls that need to traverse long distance networks. This structure has been the basis for the organization of the telecom industry for the past two decades, helping manage competition in long distance and regulate local monopoly services.

In the United States, the Telecom Act of 1996 changed all this. Deregulation drove the strategies of many companies, including AT&T. Since 1999, AT&T has been using 3Com® (then CommWorks and then UT Starcom) software-based VoIP carrier gateways and call control servers—a category of product called the softswitch—to bypass the standard local-to-long distance and long distance-to-local handoff. This saved several hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to local phone companies since the transport over IP at that time meant it was an "enhanced service" and represented a different set of regulatory requirements.

The softswitch product category requires significant functionality for trunking, carrier signaling, gateway management, accounting, provisioning, and security. The softswitch uses a completely different set of assumptions than classic central office switches to generate its unique advantages for the telecom industry of the future.