Free, a subsidiary of the Iliad Group, the second largest French ISP, is using a joint solution from IBM and Cirpack to deliver a consumer VoIP service over unbundled DSL lines. The residential VoIP is provided as an add-on to the company’s ADSL service in the areas where Free has deployed its own DSL infrastructure. The service is available in about 20 metropolitan areas in France (Paris, Lyon, Grenoble, Aix, Nice, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes, Rennes, Caen, Rouen, Lille, Nancy, Strasbourg, and to be added soon Dijon, Besançon, Montpellier).
Subscribers pay EUR 29 per month for a 2Mbps ADSL line including free phone services (including national PSTN termination) and free TV Channels. http://www.cirpack.comhttp://www.free.fr/
- In October 2003, CIRPACK and IBM Global Services announced a partnership focusing on next generation telecom voice solutions in ETSI compliant countries: Europe, Middle East, Africa, and most Asian and Latin American countries. IBM Global Services will provide the support services and systems integration expertise for CIRPACK SoftSwitch solutions enabling telecom operators to deploy new voice services while maintaining legacy services.
- CIRPACK’s softswitch platform can host a range of high-density network interfaces (IP, ATM, TDM) and supports multiple local signaling protocol variants simultaneously (ISDN, SS7, VoIP, VoATM). It can be configured to manage voice transit services (Class-4) as well as subscriber services (Class- 5), handling up to 5 millions BHCA (Busy Hour Call Attempts), and 180,000 simultaneous voice channels over any type of legacy and packet networks.