Texas Instruments, Clarent to Provide IP Telephony for Customer Premise

Intended to bring Internet Protocol (IP) telephony broadband access capabilities to the remote access market with a new family of customer premise equipment (CPE), Texas Instruments (Dallas) will partner with Clarent Corp. (Redwood City, CA), a provider of carrier-grade, phone-to-phone IP telephony systems. The IP telephony product development agreement will bring IP telephony service over the new "local loop" of broadband access technologies that includes digital subscriber line (DSL), cable modems, and wireless technologies.

The new CPE devices will work with business customers' regular telephones and will be designed to communicate with Clarent-based IP telephony technology installed in carriers' central offices and IP telephony clearinghouse providers' networks around the world, giving business customers access to a global footprint for IP telephony-based communications.

The Texas Instruments and Clarent solution is designed to include several components. The first component will be the new CPE device based on Texas Instruments' TMS320C54x DSP generation and a hardware reference design and Voice over IP embedded communications software from TI's Telogy Networks (Germantown, MD) subsidiary. The second component consists of Clarent IP telephony products that are already present in the carriers' networks and which allow the customers' calls to be routed using Voice over IP technology.

The CPE product is expected to start field tests in the spring of 2000, with general availability later in the year.

Edited by John Spofford