Before the Dawn of IP Telephony - Part 16
Frozen by discovery of fatal problem (latter half of 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
After the transfer to the affiliated company, I became a leader of the team developing component parts for OKI's IP-PBX called Line Unit (LU). Then, I discovered that I had taken charge of a task that no one dared.
Photo 1 LSI exclusively for VoIP
Developed by OKI
In June 1999, one month after I was transferred to the affiliated company, an evaluation sample of LSI for processing VoIP was delivered. It was a single chip exclusively for VoIP, the first achievement of its kind by OKI (photo 1). The chip was built with features necessary for IP telephony and gateway, and the development scale was particularly large for an LSI. We started evaluation by mounting the LSI sample on a board.
This LSI was incorporated with the concept of "pursuing the best voice quality under the installed environment" we announced at ISS '97 held in Toronto, Canada in 1997 (See article in previous series). The LSI was built with a technology for establishing voice quality over LAN and it was the key component of our IP-PBX line unit (LU). It also meant that the LSI was so crucial that the entire development project may be aborted if a fatal bug was found.
There was the need to proceed with the evaluation with caution. On the other hand, there was no time to waste. Although this is a dilemma that always occurs during product development, there is never a sufficient margin for development when there is a shipment deadline for the product. When entering early July, the time for mass product judgment of the LSI was coming near, while the evaluation was not complete.
Due to the bitter experience of discovering a fatal bug in the core LSI during the development of VOICEHUB in 1995, I obviously felt strong about performing a thorough evaluation. In order to achieve the goal of starting shipment of IP-PBX at the year-end, however, there was the need for mass production judgment of the LSI in July. Although the LSI had minor issues that could have been improved, I saw no reason for objecting to mass production since no fatal problems were found. I agreed to the "go sign" and the LSI entered the mass production stage.
Honestly speaking, I wasn't aware that the decision was so important at the time since I joined the project during the middle of development. Furthermore, the development of IP-PBX was widely known even at OKI. Different from the development of BS1100-VOICEHUB, the first VoIP product, there were expectations to release the unit as a new VoIP product group of OKI. There was no way that the development could be delayed.
Continued to next page: First problem
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