Device Arena

Alcatel-Lucent and leading independent communications holding company SureWest Communications today announced the deployment of Alcatel-Lucent’s IMS-based Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for Consumers solution to support its newly launched SureWest Digital Phone VoIP service in the Northern California region. SureWest Communications provides local telephone, long-distance, Internet, wireless, digital TV and commercial high-speed data services in Northern California and in the metropolitan Kansas City area.

SureWest is migrating its network from a traditional Class 5 switch-based infrastructure to an IP network, including IMS, for advanced services. IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) is an architecture that provides end-users with anytime, anywhere personalized services based on the blending of voice, video and data content. IMS makes blended lifestyle services, such as video, interactive gaming, telephony, Push-to-Talk and messaging available from any device and across all networks (wireline/fixed and mobile/wireless networks).

“Implementing Alcatel-Lucent’s IMS-based VoIP solution gives us the opportunity to take advantage of IMS benefits with a vendor that is the leader in IMS technology, knowledge and experience,” said Bill DeMuth, senior vice president and chief technology officer, SureWest Communications. “As we deploy our VoIP service offerings across our network, with IMS we can grow our services to include blended voice, video, data and multimedia applications. We believe our VoIP service delivers the highest quality of customer benefits and reliability in our Northern California market.”

Currently available, SureWest Digital Phone enables SureWest subscribers to use a web-based interface to customize their calling services online, including:

“SureWest and its customers are benefiting from the flexibility of Alcatel-Lucent’s IMS solution – a single common solution for wireline, wireless and converged carriers – that enables the service provider to migrate cost-effectively, step by step, to IMS while introducing useful new services at the same time,” said Gerry Cafaro, North America strategic accounts sales vice president for Alcatel-Lucent. “SureWest selected our VoIP solution because of its flexibility, supporting not only the next generation VoIP services available today, but also a wide range of services that will become available in the future.”

The Alcatel-Lucent solution deployed by SureWest consists of an IMS-based telephony application server (TAS), the Alcatel-Lucent 5420 Converged Telephony Server and Alcatel-Lucent 5420 Personal Communication Managerfully integrated with the Alcatel-Lucent IMS core architecture, which is built around Alcatel-Lucent 5450 IP Session Control. It includes the Alcatel-Lucent 5020 Media Gateway Controller-8 and Alcatel-Lucent 7520 Media Gateway.

Alcatel-Lucent