IP PBXs put through paces

Telecoms body TIA reveals results of interoperability testing by BT Exact

The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) has released the first results from its IP telephony interoperability tests.

Four vendors - Avaya, Cisco, Nortel and Alcatel - submitted PBXs and paid a total of £100,000 for them to be tested by BT Exact. The results will be sent to customers and resellers.

"Customers should demand that vendors do this," said Martin Wicks, director of convergence systems and applications at Avaya. "Interoperability is in the interests of both customers and vendors."

Siemens and Mitel, the remaining large IP telephony vendors in the UK, were notable by their absence from the project.

Alan Cobb, the TIA's director general, said: "We became interested in interoperability in 2001. Channels to market were not ready at that point and we decided to do something about that."

Paul Templeton, vice president of enterprise at Nortel EMEA, said: "This has been a great start and real progress has been made in setting up the methodology. But many requests for reassurance are about new systems working with existing TDM and data infrastructure."

After the first phase covering basic IP interoperability, the scheme will test interactions between IP and legacy TDM systems, Cobb said.

Andrew Catchpole, head of IP telephony solutions at BT Exact, said other vendors were welcome to have their products tested.

However, some vendors expressed reluctance to pay for the testing. "We backed out because of the high cost," said Mike Ballantine, business development manager at Aastra, formerly telephony vendor Ascom.

"We support the idea. It's a very positive move, but our PBX supported only 200 extensions and we didn't see people connecting it to large systems from other vendors."