Pannaway plans to announce toward the end of this month a series of enhancements to its BAS access platform that will target incumbent carriers wanting to make the transition to voice over IP.

The BAS-POTS 48R will act as a hardened switch that will be geared specifically for remote terminal deployments. Like most VoIP switches, the 1R unit will support MGCP and GR-303. However, given the company's core customer of rural telcos, the product also will support lifeline voice as well as SIP for advanced features.

Michael Skubisz, chief technology officer for Pannaway, said a number of incumbent carriers have launched VoIP service through their CLEC arms in part because they have been unsure of whether they can support the regulatory requirements that come with providing voice service as an incumbent.

"A lot of it also is economically motivated," he said. "The POTS 48 R allows us to address those POTS-only customers who will never be triple-play customers."

Indeed, the company expects its biggest customers to be those that already have started deploying high-speed data service and video packages with their traditional voice service.

"If you can deliver video, voice over IP is like a rounding error in terms of the bandwidth requirements," Skubisz said.

Among the more unique aspects of the new switch is how it generates dialtone at the premises in conjunction with Pannaway's RGN residential gateway. The company decided to provide premises-based dialtone in part to eliminate the "Ring Trip" phenomena that can occur when customers go off hook. In situations where carriers are providing service on an ADSL2+ connection, the surge of power created by users picking up the phone takes away a chunk of bandwidth from the data path. By providing dialtone on premises, though, Skubisz said the company has shown not only the ability to provide greater bandwidth but also yield up to 8db of signal-to-noise ratio improvement.

"Because we can retain a higher level of bandwidth, we can serve a lot more people," he said. "We really try to marry two different applications together to build a better triple play."