Caerus Tenders Free Softswitch Offer for Resellers

Posted: 10/2003

Caerus Tenders Free Softswitch Offer for Resellers
By Khali Henderson

Caerus Inc., the third venture for softswitch pioneer Shawn Lewis, announced in August it will provide the new CONX softswitch developed by subsidiary Caerus Networks Inc. at no cost to qualified service providers. In turn, service providers must purchase voice transport, high-speed data and enhanced calling services at market rates from Caerus IP backbone network subsidiary Volo Communications Inc.

The model has been in beta testing since July and will be commercially available this fall.

We began looking at the telecommunications industry two years ago to try to understand why advance services were not moving forward as quickly as everyone had expected, says Lewis, Caerus president and CEO. The major obstacles that we found were capital expenditure costs, which were presenting formidable barriers to entry for service providers, traditional carriers and resellers wanting to deploy advanced services. Another problem we encountered was the lack of open platforms in the marketplace and the need to invest a large amount of time and money integrating products from different vendors.

Caerus free softswitch offering seeks to address these problem, says Lewis, who wrote the patent for the first SS7 media gateway and the first softswitch, which he developed for XCOM Technologies Inc., a CLEC he co-founded and ran before its acquisition by Level 3 Communications Inc. in 1998.

Under the offer, Caerus provides carriers with its CONX, or Connection-X, softswitch. Carriers receive a virtual point code assignment designated for their switch and pay as they go at market rates for transport and enhanced services on Volo Communications nationwide MPLS-based IP backbone network that today reaches 22 U.S. cities.

There is no mark-up, says Lewis. We charge market rates or below in many cases, and build our margins into that. We expect to carry very large volumes of traffic. The company projected that by September it would pass 1 billion minutes a month across its network.

In August, Lewis reported Caerus had four companies in beta tests, and was set to expand to about a dozen companies before the beta tests concluded in September.

The CONX softswitch is an open transaction-processing engine that interworks with about 200 protocols (and possibly more with the available software development kit), including all the popular ones on the market today, in a one port-any service model. It also can be used to process non-telecom-related transactions such as alarm monitoring. The softswitch comes with its own service-creation environment so customers can develop their own services if they choose or they can use the enhanced services that Volo Communications offers. Customers can host the softswitch on their network or on Volos network.

The CONX softswitch will be commercially available within a few months, adds Lewis. It now is available only under the free program, which is open to Tier 1 and Tier 2 service providers, including CLECs and IXCs, RBOCs, cable companies and enhanced services providers.

A similar offer is available to end users using Caerus Networks iPBX.