Although cable IP telephony is at least a year away — and CableLabs' PacketCable specifications are not final — the vendor community is assembling pieces to help operators make their move.

Broadcom's introduction of PacketCable-compliant silicon, called BroadVoice, improves chip modularity and offers both 16 kb/s narrowband and 32 kb/s wideband voice compression CODECs. Cedar Point Communications, a packet switching integrator, plans to incorporate BroadVoice into its product line.

“Cable operators want to use voice compression to get the best efficiency of their plant and the number of homes they can provide service to,” said John Gleiter, Broadcom's marketing director.

ITU-recommended CODECs were not specifically designed for the application, so Broadcom developed its own set, he said.

The improved CODECs were vital, said David Spear, executive vice president of strategy and market development for Cedar Point, which has integrated a media gateway, call management server, CALEA security piece and announcement server into a single shelf.

“People are starting to realize that the amount of upstream bandwidth that's available is not enough under the current [ITU] compressions schemes and that you need some other compressions,” Spear said.

BroadVoice was shown to cable operators, but Cedar Point was under no pressure to use it, Spear said. “Early on, we made the choice to utilize their chipsets and work very closely with them in terms of overall capabilities,” he said. “We're the only vendor that has a media gateway-based solution that's utilizing their chipsets, so it makes it very easy to do new types of capabilities like BroadVoice.”

The new technology may improve cable IP telephony characteristics, but it won't accelerate deployment.

“Operators have to get really comfortable with it and get their back office integration working,” said Spear.