Before the Dawn of IP Telephony - Part 15
Development of line interface at subsidiary (1999)
These contents translated a serialization article carried by ITPro IP telephony ONLINE published by Nikkei Business Publications, Inc. Jump to the original (Japanese).
Shinji Usuba
General Manager
eSound Venture Unit
Business Incubation Division
Systems Network Group
Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd
IP telephony was beyond common sense 10 years ago. The experience during the development stage of VoIP, from the activities involving handling of voice over LAN to the commercialization of VoIP gateway, was described in the previous series. In this series, the innovative changes up to the acquisition of franchise under the name of "IP telephony" is explained from the viewpoint of a single engineer involved in the product development with faith in the possibilities of VoIP.
After making sure that the first VoIP gateway product for Europe was completed, I was assigned to an affiliated company of OKI in May 1999. At the time, OKI was in charge of product concepts and basic designs of new products and the affiliated company was in charge of detailed designs and application designs of products completed with basic designs. In other words, developments involving relatively new technologies were conducted by OKI and near-end designs and verifications were made by the affiliated company. Although developments were close to products, I was still disappointed since I felt distant from the development of the latest technologies.
My role at the affiliated company
Photo 1 Developed line unit
I was assigned two roles at the affiliated company. One was the maintenance design of small and medium capacity PBX products. The other was the development management of component parts for IP-PBX line units (hereafter "LU") developed by OKI at the time (photo 1).
The former involved model transfer of a PBX that was developed in 1998 called CTiOX to the affiliated company along with an associate that had been transferred at the same time as me. The latter line units accommodate a line interface existing on past PBX (interface for conventional analog telephones and station line trunks, which some rudely refer to as legacy units). The units were developed mainly by OKI and were then consigned to the affiliated company. VoIP-LSI as the core of the unit was developed at OKI and application development was conducted at the affiliated company based on this VoIP-LSI.
Although I missed not being a part of the latest product development, there was another part of me that needed a break from all of the madness since 1995. At OKI, there is a system called a refreshment vacation and the thought of taking a vacation did enter my mind. But this small expectation was marvelously betrayed. I experienced something like no other in my entire history of development.
Continued to next page: The troubles of LU development...
Page 1 | 2
