ALAMEDA, Calif. -- Building on three years of field success, MetaSwitch today announced a suite of significant product enhancements to its VP3500 Series Class 5 Softswitch, designed to deliver the scalability and flexibility demanded by the world's most demanding service providers. With both a major software release and a revolutionary media gateway hardware design, MetaSwitch breaks new ground with a true VoIP Class 5 platform that cost-effectively scales from small to large networks. The result delivers carriers a viable migration path for their Class 5 infrastructure, as well as opening up new VoIP opportunities.

The MetaSwitch VP3500 starts from an industry-leading position with broadband Class 5 and next generation capabilities such as IP Centrex and Web Self-Care. Building on this, the latest product release delivers a range of system enhancements that simplify deployment and increase system scalability and flexibility.

MetaSwitch engineers have achieved an industry first by collapsing the media gateway functions often provided on 3 or 4 separate cards onto a single blade. The PB family of media gateway cards sports interfaces for VoIP (Gigabit Ethernet), VoATM (OC3) and TDM (DS3), together with on-board DSPs for any-to-any transcoding and echo cancellation on every channel - up to 672 concurrent calls on the PB4000 and 2,016 on the PB5000 card.

The VP3510 media gateway chassis retains the VP3500's proven carrier-class fully redundant passive midplane and high performance packet-switched bus architecture, while increasing total system capacity by an order of magnitude thanks to greater processor, power and cooling capabilities - all in a smaller 12U form factor. Fully configured with high capacity media gateway cards, the resultant platform provides up to 26,208 simultaneous calls per chassis. Just as importantly, low-end scalability is maintained with entry-level systems starting at under 300 lines.

For geographic diversity and high-end scalability, the MetaSwitch chassis can be deployed as a one-box solution, or as part of an open softswitch architecture. In a distributed network, multiple media and/or signaling gateways are managed from a centralized call agent software entity, running on a fault-tolerant pair of industry-standard servers. Up to 500,000 subscribers can be supported in this way by a single virtual switch. MetaSwitch also continues to offer an integrated solution, with the call agent software running on dual processor blades in the media gateway - an option expected to remain popular with carriers looking for rapid deployment of standalone switches.

In a separate release:

ALAMEDA, Calif. -- MetaSwitch, the industry's leading independent vendor of broadband Class 5 softswitch solutions, today announced that it has delivered its 50th switch. The MetaSwitch VP3510 Class 5 Softswitch was installed last week at Progressive Rural Telephone Co-Op, a 6,000-line independent telephone company in Rentz, Georgia.

Progressive Rural Telephone selected MetaSwitch's VP3510 Class 5 Softswitch after an in-depth RFP and evaluation process involving 6 vendors. MetaSwitch won the bid based on its support for both tandem and Class 5 switching and the long-term stability that results from being an established, profitable company.

Initially Progressive will be deploying the MetaSwitch VP3510 as a local tandem switch, resulting in an immediate cost savings for SS7 connectivity that alone justifies the purchase price of the switch. The next phase of the deployment will be in the Class 5 domain as subscribers are migrated to the switch from the company's legacy Siemens DCO switches.

"This deployment highlights the fact that MetaSwitch can deliver a wide range of applications that directly and immediately impact telephone companies' bottom line - from a tandem switch proxying LNP requests, to exciting new VoIP opportunities," said Mike Ward, MetaSwitch Senior Vice President of Sales. "That flexibility, combined with our corporate stability, is resulting in increasing recognition in the service provider community."

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