Telephone Electronics Corporation (TEC) owns and operates six IOC’s distributed across Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. Fail Engineering provides engineering services to each of these companies. One of the services provided is the preparation of annual budgets for each Telco. In association with the 2006 budget preparation, Fail Engineering worked with TEC to perform feasibility studies to determine what the network cost for a Softswitch migration would be and also whether or not it would be cost effective to install one or more centralized Softswitches to serve this purpose rather than six individual Softswitches .

This process required an analysis of the existing Siemens host/remote switching network to determine port counts, trunking capacity, network configuration and connectivity, feature requirements and other associated factors. The network for each company included a Siemens EWSD host switch and a variety of GR303 based remotes such as the Siemens Accession and AFC 120 & AFC 240 units, as well as Siemens RCU and RLS remotes connected through Siemens proprietary signaling links. Therefore, an important goal of the study was to determine how the existing Siemens and AFC infrastructure could be leveraged to provide the most functionality with the least number of “fork-lift” upgrades. In depth technical review meetings were held with Metaswitch, Tekelec, CopperCom and Siemens to develop budgetary quotes for a proposed Softswitch migration. Site visits and conference calls were performed to check reference accounts and discuss similar projects that have been previously implemented by each vendor. In addition, meetings were held with numerous NGDLC/BLC vendors (Occam, Calix, Adtran, Ciena, etc.) to evaluate the cost of scheduled replacements of the proprietary Siemens remotes with more modern access devices. Finally, once vendor specific cost figures and designs had been compiled, a MOP and proposed installation schedule was developed to aid in the TEC planning process.