MVIP Overview (original) (raw)

An Overview

Introduction

Created in September, 1990, the Multi-Vendor Integration Protocol is the most widely used standard for the evolving field of computer telephony. MVIP focuses on inter-operation of components from different vendors and upon software portability between hardware components and between platforms.

Computer telephony brings the software flexibility, open development environments and rapid technology evolution of the computer industry to the world of telephony services. MVIP provides a flexible, sophisticated, and uniform way of moving telephony service components into standard computer chassis, under control of open software development environments based on UNIX, OS/2, DOS, or Windows. (See Figure 1)

Over 175 MVIP-compatible component or board-level products are available for resale from over 65 companies world-wide. Some of the available technologies include:

Telephony Interfaces
T1/E1
ISDN PRI and BRI
SS7
Analog loopstart, groundstart, DID (DDI), E&M
Proprietary PBX interfaces

Mixed Media
Voice Processing
Facsimile
Call Processing
Speech Recognition
Text-To-Speech
Telephone Call Switching
Audio Conferencing
Video Codecs
Video Conferencing

Data Communications
Inverse Multiplexing
LAN-WAN Interfaces
IsoEthernet
FDDI-II
ATM
V.110, V.120

This wealth of MVIP-compatible components has made possible a thriving market in new telephone service platforms. MVIP has provided a standard way to add PC technology to proprietary PBXs and other telephony systems. Most significantly, MVIP has enabled a wealth of new computer telephony applications.

Single-chassis MVIP-90 has four parts:

Single-chassis H-MVIP is a compatible superset of MVIP-90 that extends the system to handle up to 3,072 x 64Kbps (3,072 time slots or 1,536 full-duplex conversations).

A family of multi-chassis MVIP standards (MC-MVIP) allow MVIP systems to scale to any size.

MVIP simplifies the telephony interface and supports integration for voice processing, fax, data communications, video conferencing and other computer technologies that require connection to the telephone network. (See Figure 3) As a multi-vendor standard, MVIP provides access to a wide range of technologies and interfaces. MVIP provides larger markets for board manufacturers and component suppliers while at the same time providing increased flexibility and reduced development time for the system developer.

MVIP is an open, non-proprietary family of standards for manipulating telephone traffic in a computer environment.

Computer culture and telephone live very close to each other in the technology universe and in the "real-life" universe. For the past twenty years or so there has been intense interaction between these two cultures. But, in spite of all that, in many ways these two cultures and the people of these two cultures still see each other as invaders from alien planets. MVIP is a meeting ground for these two cultures.

MVIP is a remarkable cross-cultural link, that makes it possible to literally plug the public switched telephone network into the chassis of an off-the-shelf personal computer. It allows any software developer to manipulate a telephone call just like he or she would any other type of data in the computer. With MVIP, thousands upon thousands of software developers with a virtually unlimited range of ideas can interact effectively with the telephone universe. And, they are free from the overhead burden -- billing, reporting, security, guaranteed service, worldwide compatibility, etc. -- under which developers of telephone applications have traditionally labored.

That's why MVIP is important: it makes it possible to combine the unlimited creativity of entrepreneurial developers with the enormous power of the telephone network. History has shown that, when forces like that are put together the result can be an explosion of new ideas and services, a "big bang" that can create a whole new industry.

A Quick History of the MVIP Standard

The idea of MVIP was born in 1989. It was sparked by an almost accidental meeting of people who were, unknown to each other at the time, tunneling along in the dark toward each other. And it was fostered by the decision by the founding few that it made more sense to open the standard up to the whole world and hope that everyone could prosper, rather than try to control the standard and maximize short-term gain for a few.

Natural MicroSystems, Inc., Mitel and GammaLink were key players at the start. Up to 1989, Natural MicroSystems had been marching along building a board that you could plug into your PC and have an instant voice mail system. It cost only a few hundred dollars, it worked well, and thousands of people bought them. But it only worked on one telephone line, and Natural MicroSystems was convinced they needed a multi-line system. So, late in 1989, they introduced a 4-line system. Brough Turner, a Natural MicroSystems founder and one of the developers of the 4-port board believed (as did the rest of the management team at Natural MicroSystems) that they needed to leverage the new product technology by actively pursuing partnerships. Their goal was to get into the T1 market as quickly as possible, because that was where they thought the opportunities for growth lay.

Turner made it his business to identify and talk to every company that had, by that point in 1989, pulled a T-1 or E-1 digital telephone trunk into a PC. He identified about a dozen companies. Most were interested in data related applications. He discovered that most of the companies had developed a multi-board set to solve their problem. Typically they used a ribbon cable to connect the cards together, and everybody had a different scheme for routing calls between cards. Similarly, Turner was looking for a way to route telephone data from a T1 interface to a DSP (digital signal processing) board. He also wanted to do telephone switching inside the PC, initially in order to switch calls from a voice board to a fax board, and later to build small telemarketing systems that would let you switch operators among telephone trunks dynamically. Turner and other engineers at Natural MicroSystems developed a solution that leveraged a T1/E1 prototyping board made by Mitel Corporation.

Turner's research was leading to a Natural MicroSystems product, but not to MVIP. The breakthrough came by accident. While making a West Coast sales trip, Turner had an empty space in his schedule, so he filled it by paying a courtesy call on GammaLink, in Sunnyvale, California. The two companies had a common customer, who was using GammaLink fax boards and Natural MicroSystems voice boards.

When Turner sat down in the GammaLink conference room, he saw that the white board was covered with information about T-1. When he asked about it, the GammaLink engineers told him they had been instructed to figure out how to put their fax boards on T-1 and, since they didn't have experience with T1, they had a consultant come in to brief them. Turner thought he saw his opportunity. He explained to GammaLink that he had just spent 6 months working on this problem and he almost had a complete scheme of what he intended to do. He offered to give his work to GammaLink if they would agree to do the same things he was doing -- in effect, to follow an _ad hoc_standard.

GammaLink agreed, and that was the start of the MVIP standard. That was in February, 1990. Turner then went back to the companies he had contacted earlier to see if they were interested in a common standard. About a dozen showed interest in utilizing MVIP, and seven were prepared to spend money to send a representative to New York for an initial meeting, which took place in September, 1990.

At a press conference on September 18, 1990, the seven founding companies publicly announced the existence of MVIP, their support of MVIP, and the fact that they had MVIP products available or in development. The companies were:

Brooktrout Technology, Inc., Needham, MA
GammaLink (now part of Dialogic Corporation), Sunnyvale, CA
Mitel Corporation, Kanata, Ontario
Natural MicroSystems Corporation, Natick, MA
Promptus Communications, Inc., Portsmouth, RI
Scott Instruments (now part of Voice Control Systems), Dallas, TX
Voice Processing Corporation, Cambridge, MA

It is both revealing and typical of the history of MVIP as a standard that in 1990, when the standard barely existed, two "MVIP standard" products were already in beta test at customer sites and soon to go into production. MVIP was clearly not a well-thought-out marketing strategy designed to maneuver the competition off the game board. It was more the response of engineers in several different companies who recognized the fact that they needed a standard solution to a difficult problem, and that they were more likely to succeed if they worked together. One of the products already in beta test in 1990 was a Natural MicroSystems product that combined one of their DSP-based voice boards with a T-1 trunk interface made by modifying a standard Mitel product. The original engineering notes that became the MVIP 90 standard included directions for modifying the Mitel board to make the T-1 interface.

Before the end of 1990 the MVIP 90 standard was available to anyone willing to pay $295 for it. The price included the technology, documentation and unlimited rights to do anything you wanted with it. Natural MicroSystems still owned the technology and the copyrights, but they also arranged for Mitel and Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT) to sell the technology as well.

A year later, in the fall of 1991, MVIP reached a critical milestone when Rhetorex adopted the standard. Rhetorex was and remains a direct competitor to Natural MicroSystems. Rhetorex' participation was a clear signal that MVIP was not only open, but that it was not going to be controlled by any single vendor. It was on its way to becoming a legitimate industry standard.

By late 1992, more than 140 companies had licensed MVIP. The standard had been designed into numerous proprietary systems, from PBXs to enhanced service platforms. Over 30 board-level MVIP products were available from 17 different companies. Licenses were being distributed by Natural MicroSystems, Mitel, and NTT International.

1992 also saw further organization within the active MVIP community, with the formation of a Steering Committee, an Education Committee, a Technical Committee, and a Standards Committee.

At the third annual MVIP conference in 1993, there were over 200 licensees, over 55 board-level products available, and an MVIP-specific integrated circuit chip, the Flexible MVIP Interface Circuit (FMIC) was available in production quantities. The MVIP Technical Committee presented a Connection Control API standard, and reported progress on Multi-Chassis MVIP.

Also, at the 1993 MVIP conference, the MVIP Steering and Education Committees unveiled GO-MVIP, the Global Organization for MVIP, an independent body being formed to further the work of the MVIP committees and to take the MVIP protocols to formal standards. With the advent of GO-MVIP, licensing was discontinued and the standard was put in the public domain.

By early 1996, many hundreds of companies are participants in MVIP, and there are over 175 MVIP compatible board-level products on the market.

The MVIP Family of Standards

Beyond the original MVIP Standard (MVIP-90), the MVIP Technical Committee has developed, and participating companies have successfully deployed, several additional standards, including MVIP Connection Control, a higher-level software standard and Multi-Chassis MVIP Type MC1, a high capacity inter-chassis telephony bus that supports inter-operation between MVIP chassis and between MVIP chassis and many other telephony systems. Working groups within the MVIP Technical Committee are addressing higher-level software standards and additional computer and operating-system-specific interfaces. Two standards address substantially higher-capacity operation in single and multi-chassis systems. These standards are H-MVIP and MC-MVIP.

H-MVIP (High Capacity MVIP) is a compatible super-set of MVIP-90 that provides up to 3,072 time-slots of capacity within a single MVIP chassis.

MC-MVIP (Multi-Chassis MVIP) provides inter-chassis connectivity. It uses common software and several alternative physical means to provide from two to several thousand 64 Kbps channels (time-slots) between MVIP and other telephony equipped chassis.

MVIP-90

MVIP-90 is the original MVIP standard. It is based on the technical notes developed at Natural MicroSystems in 1989 and 1990, with the assistance of Mitel Corporation and Promptus Communications, and later with the assistance of the MVIP Technical Committee. MVIP-90 is the original MVIP standard for single-chassis systems. The single chassis can be any of a wide variety of computers, including any standard IBM-compatible PC, any micro-channel-based computer, or any computer based in the ISO VME bus standard. MVIP-90 is designed to run in a synchronous environment, controlled by a single CPU, at a very short distance (within the same box, for all practical purposes).

MVIP-90 was adopted by the founding members of GO-MVIP in June 1994. Documentation is available through the GO-MVIP organization. Membership in the GO-MVIP organization starts at $500 per year and includes documentation for MVIP-90, H-MVIP, and MC-MVIP (MC1 and MC3), MVIP-95, Connection Control, and a one-year update service.

MVIP-90 is maintained by GO-MVIP, who issue periodic bulletins and make available updates.

Connection Control API

From its beginning, MVIP has included software standards to allow boards from different vendors to work together effectively. The original MVIP-90 specification includes a specification for a common device driver interface. The objective was to guarantee that, even if a developer bought MVIP-compliant boards from different vendors for different functions, the MVIP interface, switching, clock control, etc., could be controlled by software that would be the same, regardless of who manufactured the boards.

Initally, not all developers of MVIP compliant boards provided MVIP compliant device drivers. But as more higher-level software became available,compliant device drivers became the norm. With the advent of Multi-Chassis MVIP, there was a great deal of interest in a common higher-level, switching-level API (Application Programming Interface) that would look the same, whether you had a single board in a single chassis, or multiple chassis. The resulting high-level API is the MVIP Connection Control Standard, which was published in October, 1993. (See Figure 4)

The first product conforming to the MVIP Connection Control Standard was Mitel's Connection Master software, which was introduced in 1994. The introduction of Connection Master has been an important incentive to developers to make sure that they provide MVIP compliant drivers, so their product can take advantage of the tools offered by Connection Master.

H-MVIP

H-MVIP is a compatible superset of MVIP-90 that significantly expands the capacity of the MVIP standard. Like MVIP-90, H-MVIP is a single-chassis system standard. It extends the call-carrying capacity of MVIP from 512 to 3,072 time slots (or 3,072 B channels), in a single chassis, in a completely scalable fashion. That is, time slots can be added in stages from the 512 (of MVIP-90) up to 3,072.

H-MVIP was published as a draft standard in 1994, was adopted in 1995 by GO-MVIP Technical Committee.

Multi-Chassis MVIP

One of the basic functions of the GO-MVIP organization is technical development of the standards. Early in 1992, the MVIP community formed an MVIP Technical Committee. One of the first projects the committee tackled was the issue of a multi-chassis system. The market was sending clear signals that there was a significant demand for larger systems. To build larger systems, it would be necessary to expand beyond the capacity you could practically fit in one computer chassis. The problem was how to extend the MVIP standard outside the first computer box.

This problem is non-trivial. As soon as more than one CPU is involved, coordination becomes a major issue. As soon as data must be passed from one box to another, outside the computer's internal bus structure, the design must deal with issues of latency, speed on the bus or cable between computers, interference from other traffic on the bus, etc. While the multi-chassis standard had to be totally compatible with MVIP-90, it also had to meet a number of additional technical challenges. Even more important, from a marketing perspective, the multi-chassis MVIP standard had to give developers the ability to create a single piece of application software that could then be used across a range of hardware platforms providing different levels of performance and capacity: scalable applications using common software. And there must be a smooth cost curve as the system grows from one, to two, to three, and to_n_ computers.

The first documentation for the MVIP multi-chassis standard was released in 1993. The first products based on this specification, Amtelco's MC1 adapter cards, were released in 1994. In 1995, Natural MicroSystems released its MC1 adaptor. Multi-Chassis MVIP defines a common approach and common software interfaces, with alternate physical media referred to as MC1, MC2, MC3, and MC4. This approach allows tradeoffs in capacity, distance, and cost, while preserving a single software investment.

MC1: TDM on Twisted-Pair Copper

MC1 is similar to the single-chassis MVIP Bus concept, but operates at 4.096 Mbps over twisted-pair cable using differentially driven signals. The standard includes redundant clocks and is easily configured for fault-tolerant operation. MC1 is economical. However, its synchronous design limits cable lengths to no more then 15 meters. MC1 can support up to 20 attached nodes and provides up to 1,536 time-slots per cable (3,072 time-slots in a dual cable configuration). Multiple companies product MC1 interfaces. MC1 is also used to connect MVIP-based PCs to other proprietary systems.

MC2: FDDI-II on Fiber or Copper

MC2 leverages the second generation of the Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI-II) to carry up to 1,536 channels worth of 64 Kbps data between hundreds of chassis over distances of up to 60 km. FDDI-II is an ANSI standard, and MVIP-compatible FDDI-II interfaces have been developed by AWA Communications (NSW, Australia). A dual FDDI-II ring can provide up to 3,072 x 64 Kbps of isochronous capacity.

MC3: SDH/SONET

MC3 is based on international standards for the Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH), also known as the Synchronous Optical Network (SONET). As used for multi-chassis MVIP, SDH/SONET technology operates at 155 Mbps and provides 4,800 x 64 Kbps of isochronous capacity in a dual ring configuration. The necessary interface components are readily available, and board-level designs are in progress.

MC4: ATM Technology

MC4 uses switched or permanent virtual circuits (SVC or PVC) within an ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) network to provide a full mesh of multiple point-to-point 64Kbps channels between chassis in a multi-chassis MVIP system.

A Word About the Value of Vendor Independence

Terms like "standard" and "standards-based" and "the industry standard" have become so widely used that they are being driven into irrelevancy, at least as they are used in marketing. In the real world, however, the terms can and should be used with some precision.

There are several kinds of standards. A de jure standard is one that has been adopted by an independent, nationally recognized standards-setting body, like IEEE, ANSI or ECMA. An example of a de jure standard is the VME bus standard, which has been adopted by ANSI.

There are also de facto standards, which are a lot more difficult to define. A _de facto_standard is not recognized by an independent standards setting group, but, at least in theory, it is broadly recognized and broadly used. One good example is the Windows graphical user interface. Windows is widely recognized and used as the standard way to graphically present information on the user's screen, but it is not recognized by any standards body.

"Open standard" is another often cited term. "Open" usually means that a standard has been published and is available to anyone who is willing to pay for it. The cost is often nothing, but there are other cases in which the cost is high -- even tens of thousands of dollars. "Open" could mean de facto, it definitely does notmean de jure, and it certainly does not mean independent. Many "open" standards, while readily available to anyone, very often at little or no cost, are entirely controlled by a single company. Again, Windows is a de facto standard, and it may be "open," but it is controlled entirely by Microsoft.

MVIP is today a de facto standard, in that it is widely used. It is very "open" in that it is fully documented and available to anyone. Perhaps most important, MVIP is vendor independent. That is, no single vendor controls the standard. It is owned and controlled by GO-MVIP, an independent trade association with over 80 dues-paying members and several hundred other contributing organizations. While the founding group of companies has had a significant impact on the development of MVIP, the GO-MVIP organization has been open to divergent views. Directly competing companies are members of GO-MVIP and work together within the organization. For potential users of MVIP, this is an extremely important factor. Because the organization is independent, and because it includes competitors, as well as non-competitors from totally different markets, with totally different interests, GO-MVIP is well suited to support a truly independent standard. By its nature, the organization is designed to create standards that are best for doing their job, notbest suited to serve the needs one vendor.

Having directly competing companies work together on a standard usually means that the resulting standard reflects the broadest needs of users. And having diverse contributors often opens up the standard to markets and customers that the originators of the technology would never have thought about. The result is a bigger market for everyone.

The objective of the GO-MVIP organization is to promote the widespread use of MVIP as a _de facto_standard. The organization would also support efforts to pass selected de facto standards over to recognized standards-setting organizations, like ANSI.

Thank you for visiting the GO-MVIP Website. For more GO-MVIP information contact:

GO-MVIP, Inc. 3220 N Street, NW, Suite 360 Washington , DC 20007 Tel: 1-800-NOW-MVIP (US and Canada) Tel +1-903-769-3717; Fax: +1-903-769-3818 Email: info@mvip.org

Web Site feedback may be sent to the webmaster Kristin Weir at admin@mvip.org.