3Com, CITEL Offer New Gateway

The CITELlink IP Handset Gateway is a slide-in card that supports Nortel Networks' Norstar M7310 and M7208 digital handsets, translating the legacy PBX handset protocol into the IP PBX protocol used by 3Com's NBX 100 and SuperStack 3 NBX IP telephony platforms.

Solution providers can use the technology to transition clients to IP telephony while preserving the familiarity end users have with their phones, said John Graven, COO of Computer Telephony Concepts, a Mentor, Ohio, solution provider. Customers can also save thousands of dollars in equipment and labor fees associated with switching out old phones for new ones, he said.

"The best way to describe it is, this is what customers have been waiting for," Graven said. "It's going to be, 'Wow, we can do this now,' " he said.

By transitioning to IP telephony, customers gain self-management capabilities not available on traditional telephony systems, which are proprietary and require costly service calls for every end-user move, add or change, Graven said.

The gateway, which supports 16 handsets per card, will be sold through 3Com's solution provider partners that become CITEL certified, said Michael Robinson, CTO of CITEL, Seattle.

"Our road map calls for rolling out one to two products per quarter, and each of those products would connect a different kind of legacy PBX phone to some kind of an IP telephony back end," Robinson said.

CITELlink IP Handset Gateway is scheduled to ship later this month for $2,000.

Separately, 3Com unveiled System Software 4.1 for its NBX family, which doubles the product line's maximum device capacity to 1,500. The additional capacity provided by the free software upgrade should expand the range of customers 3Com solution providers can target, said Greg Zweig, product manager at 3Com, based here.