Yankee: SS7 to IP Transition Confused

BOSTON -- Although the traditional SS7 is strained by the proliferation ofsuch message-intensive applications such as local number portability (LNP)and short message services (SMS), the path to IP-based signaling is unclearto both service providers and many next-generation voice equipment vendors.Vendors and service providers alike are indebted to advances of thesignaling technology vendors for their future solutions, according to therecent Yankee Group Report entitled "SS7 Market Update 2002: Signals ofUncertainty."Mindy Hiebert, a senior analyst for the Yankee Group's CommunicationsNetwork Infrastructure research and consulting practice, and author of theReport, states, "Within the context of the softswitch framework, signalinggateway functionality provides bridging and interworking functionalitiesthat enable SS7 signals to be successfully communicated within apacket-based network."  Hiebert concludes, "Signaling is not an area tooverlook when building carrier-class network technologies; and takinglightly the subject and expecting the work to be done by standard bodies orlegacy vendors will be a mistake that will only become apparent when it istoo late."Yankee Group