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.