Between 4 and 16 October the Multiservice Switching Forum (MSF) will be staging its 2004 Global MSF Interoperability (GMI) across sites in Asia, Europe and North America. According to UK participating carrier lab BT Exact, the event will test point-to-point voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) within a single service provider's network. It will then increase in complexity as value added services (including video), connectivity to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), and direct connectivity between two VoIP carrier networks are demonstrated on a global basis. In each scenario, requirements that are deemed critical for real-world NGN deployments such as security, quality of service (QoS), routeing, and network management, will be demonstrated. Other carrier labs participating in GMI 2004 are those of KT (South Korea), NTT (Japan), and Qwest (USA).

The MSF itself says that GMI 2004 will test state-of-the-art network elements essential to support fully integrated VoIP solutions. The performance of elements such as application servers, media servers, service brokers, call agents, bandwidth managers and other control and management systems will be assessed against the specific protocols defined in MSF interoperability agreements (IAs).

In all, 26 companies are scheduled to take part in this major interoperability exercise. Growing interest in such activity marks a shifting of industry focus from NGN construction to NGN commercialisation. "A sign of maturing technology is vendor and product interoperability and the upfront work being conducted by the MSF can help move VoIP to primetime", argues Kevin Mitchell, directing analyst at Infonetics Research.
John Williamson