Advanced Telecom Research Makes It Possible to Deliver Scalable Mobile Phone Service over Existing Web Servers

NEW YORK, May 7, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Researchers at Columbia University, working with advanced tech at AT&T Research Labs announced that Mobicent SIP Servlets (MSS) from Telestax have achieved a breakthrough in high level availability for mobile telecommunications middleware. The innovation in service architecture compares favorably to Oracle OCCAS and IBM Websphere, but is specifically built for growing telecom providers. Telestax MSS now makes it possible to deploy reliable VoIP service on existing web servers using HTML5 WebRTC and SIP Over WebSockets. The research indicates that maximum availability of VoIP.

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The research paper combines the latest research on the maximum availability services, like telephone calls where a service interruption is considered a failure. Refreshing a web page is an acceptable outcome but dropped calls can destroy the reputation of a telecom service. Maximum availability is also a requirement for emergency communications, which are regulated according to strict federal guidelines. In an emergency, a dropped call is quite literally a matter of life and death, so maximum availability is an absolute necessity.

Comparing the Telestax SIP Servlets with Websphere and OCCAS; researchers looked at Simultaneous Failures, Operational Costs, and Scaling in terms of Increments and Efficiencies. Smaller telecom companies, especially in developing nations, struggle with spotty telecom infrastructure and the enormous costs of maintaining carrier grade servers. Currently, the solution is to start small and scale up, but scaling itself has been part of the problem.

If the telecom service provider is able to sign up enough users to be profitable, they run into the problem of scaling up server capacity fast enough to avoid losing users through unreliable service. This is where the maximum availability is key for a VoIP server. The innovation in Telestax SIP Servlets platform is a better choice for cost and scalability increments of deployment. In addition, SIP Servlets and load balancers that are open source share a broader user community, allowing them to operate over incompatible web software and communications hardware. This makes it possible for mobile telecom companies to deliver reliable VoIP on existing web application servers, as well as the streaming content that users want from the mobile web, like video conferencing, streaming multimedia distribution, instant messaging, presence information, file transfer and online games.

According to the study, Mobicent SIP Servlets (MSS) "adapts dynamically to failures through lazy replication and selection of new replication buddies. This allows MSS to restore protection to machine failures and rack failures automatically even without restarting failed servers in the same replication group. Therefore, the odds of session loss in MSS are lower than in OCCAS or WAS."

Brazilian mobile provider Algar Telecom in Brazil is in the first rank of companies deploying these innovations currently. They recently teamed with middleware telecom developers at Austin, TX-based Telestax to come up with a rapid solution for providing robust telecom services across Brazil. Despite rapid growth and infrastructure challenges, Algar has deployed an interactive voice response service capable of handling 120,000 calls per day. Their messaging service now delivers more than 500,000 SMS messages each day.

For more information on Algar Telecom and the joint innovation project, contact Normandes Moreira Jr. at (34) 9664 8900 or [email protected]

For details on Columbia University and AT&T's innovative research, see An Evaluation Framework for Highly Available and Scalable SIP Server Clusters at the Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Principles, Systems and Applications of IP Telecommunications

SOURCE Telestax