TI Draws First Blood in VoIP Architecture Battle

"Fall VON, BOSTON (October 18, 2004) -- Texas Instruments Incorporated (NYSE:TXN) (TI) announced today its next-generation architecture for Voice over Cable (VoCable) products, extending its strategy to provide cable operators with feature rich technology for integrated voice and high speed data services on a single platform. The single chip Puma IV architecture, built upon TI´s current market leading VoCable product offering, capitalizes on TI´s strength in DOCSIS® hardware and software, digital signal processor (DSP) technology and Telogy SoftwareTM for Voice over IP."

This is groundbreaking in that the speed of packet assembly and decoding will increase by an order of magnitude. This will directly improve the quality of the voice calls over the Internet and bring VoIP calls transmitted over a private network to carrier grade performance. I look forward to similar products from Broadcom, TI's main competitor.

Broadband industry leaders OCCAM and Paradyne have both standardized on the Broadcom chipset for ADSL2+ loop carrier systems. DSL modem manufacturers could use either the TI or subsequent Broadcom integrated chipsets to absolutely nail the quality of VoIP over open networks. This is as significant as CISCO's strides in MPLS technology.

The Weight challenged lady is warming up. Carriers need to forklift their old architecture ASAP!