Many of you reading this will have a Metaswitch universal media gateway (UMG) in your central office used for TDM connectivity to the PSTN or to TDM subscribers. This might be a standalone box, or (more likely) an integrated softswitch (IS). If you purchased it before 2012 it’s most likely a VP2510/VP3510, or a more recent system might be an ATCA-based CH6010 chassis.
However, neither of these products is still available for sale, so if you want to upgrade your Metaswitch media gateway in the future, you should be looking at the Tmedia product line from a company named TelcoBridges. TelcoBridges has a version of its product specifically designed to interoperate with the Metaswitch CFS (in partnership with Metaswitch/Microsoft), and we (Award Consulting) are also an Alliance Partner of TelcoBridges.
Even if you’re looking at cloud-hosted platforms for voice, if you need local TDM connectivity (or to comply with NECA regulations), you’ll still need a local TDM media gateway, and all of the cloud providers we’ve spoken to are recommending TelcoBridges products to meet that need.
It’s clear that TelcoBridges is an increasingly important vendor for our industry, which is why we decided to partner with them, and in this article we’ll be giving you an overview of what to expect if you’re moving from a Metaswitch UMG to a TelcoBridges Tmedia product.
Tmedia Product Overview
If you want full details about the products, check out the TelcoBridges website, but we’ll provide a quick overview.
The TelcoBridges Tmedia products come in three sizes:
- The Tmedia TMG800 supports a maximum of 16 T1s
- The Tmedia TMG3200 supports up to 64 T1s, or up to 3 DS3s or 1 OC-3
- The Tmedia TMG7800 operates at a much larger scale – up to 1024 T1s or 48 DS3s
By comparison, an ATCA UMG with RT6701 (T1) cards supports 48 T1s at full capacity (between the TMG800 and TMG3200), or with RT6703 (DS3) cards it supports 24 DS3s, which is closer in scale to the TMG7800.
From an architectural point-of-view, there are a couple of things worth knowing:
- The Metaswitch UMG is always controlled by H.248 from the CFS. It’s a slave system that simply does what it’s told.
- The TelcoBridges Tmedia products can operate in the same way, but because it’s a standalone product it can also operate independently – as a simple router between TDM and VoIP traffic. You could set up a set of SIP trunks on one side, and some SS7/ISUP trunks on the other, and route calls between the two. This is how it would most commonly be set up when working with a cloud-hosted voice platform.
- A single TMG800 or TMG3200 is a 1U box that is not redundant – so the typical redundancy model is 1:1 redundancy by having two systems operating as a pair.
Tmedia Features vs UMG
The Tmedia supports most of the same protocols you are familiar with on the Metaswitch UMG:
- SS7 links via TDM or SIGTRAN, ISUP, T1 CAS, SIP, ISDN PRI, H.248.
- A wide variety of codecs, including T.38 for fax.
The only notable differences are that the TelcoBridges product doesn’t support GR-303 (an older protocol for TDM subscribers that is becoming fairly rare) and it doesn’t have in-built Emergency Standalone capabilities like the Metaswitch UMG. It wouldn’t really be possible for a third-party media gateway to become a class 5 switch in ESA mode, so the best solution to that problem is to use the Metaswitch ESA Proxy application alongside the Tmedia.
Management and Diagnostics Interfaces
The Metaswitch UMG is managed primarily from the desktop application MetaView Explorer, whereas the Tmedia has a web-interface for configuration – and in both cases the configuration settings are organized in a tree structure.
The Tmedia products also have a command line interface that can be used for troubleshooting, and setting up packet captures – but one of the coolest parts of the new integration work between TelcoBridges and Metaswitch/Microsoft is that you can now see diagnostics from the Tmedia products directly in the Metaswitch Service Assurance Server (SAS) platform.
Next Steps
Our goal in this article has been to give you an introduction to the TelcoBridges media gateway platform, so you have some familiarity with the product if it ever becomes relevant in your network. If you want to dig deeper then TelcoBridges has a lot of training material on YouTube.
If you find yourself considering a new media gateway, whether as an upgrade to your Metaswitch deployment or as part of a move to a cloud-hosted solution, please contact us and we’ll be happy to advise you on your options.
We know it can be hard to add a new vendor into your network, and to learn how to use a new product – which is why we partnered with TelcoBridges in January 2022. Our team has completed training, and we’ve worked on several TelcoBridges commissioning and migration projects for our clients over the past year – so when you need help, we’ll be ready to assist you. Please don’t hesitate to reach out.
