Sangoma SS7 Media Gateway
Case Study

New Regulation Creates Functionality Needs, and a Surprising Solution Does the Job Best

While the IP PBX sector has long faced fierce competition between commercial and open source solutions, the core network carrier infrastructure has remained the domain of large vendors. Perhaps that won't be true for much longer.

The VoiceWorks 64 E1 installation of Asterisk-and-Sangoma ss7 Media Gateway solution shows that large vendors aren't the only option. Carriers can now benefit from the lower cost, more flexible open source world while maintaining reliability.

Customer Problem

In 2007, UKE (Polish Telecom Regulator) told main Polish Carriers they must pre-announce call tariffs for premium rate traffic before charging the customer for the call. To make matters worse, time was tight. One of the main Polish Carriers, GTSEnergis, has only 3 weeks to comply with the regulation, or face a heavy fine.

Even though analysis showed that an open ss7 based solution would not deliver the required stability, scalability and confidence, GTSEnergis chose an Asterisk solution as a stop-gap measure, while they con-tinued to look for a “proper solution”. GTS Energis contacted VoiceWorks, an open source telephony integrator specialising in Asterisk, FreeSwitch, sipXecs, and OpenSER based deployments.

VoiceWorks Solution

The product that did the job was combination of Asterisk and Sangoma ss7 Media Gateway, originally developed by Michael Muller (now working for Sangoma). Initial tests showed that the system was stable and the required custom features could be developed quickly. Most important, however, was the level of support that VoiceWorks received from Sangoma.

"This gave us the confidence to proceed with the project on such demanding deadlines," said VoiceWorks CTO, Paweł Pierścionek (aka Urtho).

Within the 3-week deadline, VoiceWorks developed custom applications, including a monitoring and configruation system allowing GTS Energis to assign number ranges and upload appropriate pre-announcements.

The delivered platform consisted of eight SUN x2200 servers with two Sangoma a104de cards, as well as configuration and monitoring nested on a x2100 server.

The project was finished on time. Required stability was reached within two weeks, with small SMG software improvements delivered by Sangoma.

Within a few months of the deployment, the platform gained such trust of the GTSEnergis engineers that new features were requested, such as emergency number mapping and intelligent number routing. Many small features, which otherwise required expensive upgrades to other GTS Energis infrastructure, were being implemented on the fly by VoiceWorks using the initial platform.

The current setup is best explained by the diagram.