Jasomi's PeerPoint Substantially Improves On-Net VoIP Call Economics, Solves Far-End NAT Traversal Without the Need to Carry Call Media.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SUPERCOMM 2003

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 3, 2003

SUPERCOMM

Major new functionality in Jasomi's PeerPoint 3.0 Session Controller

greatly reduces service provider's cost basis

for carrying VoIP Net to Net calls

Jasomi's third major release of its award-winning PeerPoint Centrex Edition far-end NAT traversal solution now enables calls across many kinds of firewall without having to carry the call's media. Previously, all far-end NAT solution devices required that the call media passed through the solution device itself en-route between caller and callee. With the ground-breaking dynamic firewall characterization capabilities in the new Jasomi PeerPoint, the call's media can flow directly from caller to callee immediately after call set-up in many cases. This greatly reduces the service provider's bandwidth requirements, correspondingly improving the economics of carrying Net to net calls. Separately, Jasomi announced 6 new customer deployments of its PeerPoint product line. The company is demonstrating its products and technologies in the SIPForum and IPCC Pavilions at SuperComm this week in Atlanta, GA.

"This is one of the most innovative things we've ever done," said Dan Freedman, CEO of Jasomi Networks. "At call set-up time, PeerPoint 3.0 dynamically characterizes all of the NAT devices involved in a call, such as the caller's and callee's firewalls. If it determines that those devices will allow media streams to come from the other end's phone, it dynamically instructs each phone to send and receive media directly to the other end of the call, bypassing PeerPoint completely. It turns out that for most residential, small business, and medium business subscribers, this solution works like a charm. The result is that service providers using PeerPoint 3.0 have a sharply reduced cost basis for offering On-Net voice and video calls."

Jasomi's PeerPoint NAT-traversal solution removes a missing link in service providers' Centrex or hosted PBX telephony business models, enabling SIP-based voice services across the Net to residential, SOHO, and small-to-medium enterprise customers. Its major strength is that it solves NAT and firewall problems for VoIP service providers without requiring them to deploy any equipment on the customer premises. Enterprise and call-center customers can use the same technology to support home and roving users, in effect acting as a service provider to those users.

NAT is present in various forms on virtually all firewalls in use at home and in the enterprise. To date, most firewalls are unable to cope with the complex translations needed to support inbound and outbound voice calls. The result has been an inability for VoIP service providers to effectively penetrate into large markets without putting special VoIP-aware NAT routing equipment at each customer's site.

Today's announcement is the latest in a string of innovations for Jasomi, including having the industry's first SIP-to-SIP gateway, the first far-end NAT traversal solution for VoIP, and the first far-end video-over-IP NAT traversal solution.

How it Works

PeerPoint 3.0's media path optimization technology works without needing any direct knowledge of the call's NAT devices or firewalls, and also without requiring any direct communication with those devices. It simply uses the SIP protocol to perform a call-setup-time investigation of the properties of these devices, and uses the results to decide whether or not media path optimization will work in each case. If it will work, PeerPoint (which until that time has been carrying the call's media to ensure that early media flows properly) uses the SIP protocol to instruct each of the phones in the call to stop sending its media through PeerPoint, and to start sending its media to the other phone in the call via that phone's firewall. To ensure that there are no audio or video anomalies caused by the switch, PeerPoint continues to accept and relay call media until it is certain that media is now correctly flowing over the newly optimized path. All of this typically occurs within the first few hundred milliseconds of the call.

"As we developed the technology to optimize media, one of the things we were the most concerned about was the avoidance of clicks, buzzes, or other kinds of audio anomalies," said Johnson Wu, VP of Technical Services at Jasomi. "We had to do considerable work to ensure that the initial media path continued to have the ability to carry media packets until the newly optimized path took over. Once we crossed that barrier, the transition from old path to new path became completely seamless."

Jasomi expects its dynamic media path optimization technology to be of greatest interest to service providers supporting large residential and small/medium business customers, where the innovation can make the greatest impact in terms of reducing the cost basis of On-Net calls. Recently, the industry has adopted a pricing model that grants retail subscribers free or near-free access to calls made to other network participants. It is for these calls in particular that Jasomi's newest technology can offer the greatest competitive advantage to service providers, allowing them to offer more competitive rates for other, more profitable calls.

About Jasomi Networks

Jasomi Networks brings products to market that enable or improve IP telephony business models. The company's focus is on creating innovative, practical solutions that effectively solve specific IP telephony problems. Jasomi is a carrier-focused company that recognizes and enhances the entire value chain from carrier to reseller and service provider to enterprise. Jasomi Networks is based in San Jose, CA and Calgary, Canada, and is privately held. For further information, contact Jasomi Networks at (408) 252-VoIP (8647), or send email to [e-mail]. Jasomi's web site is www.jasomi.com.

PeerPoint is a trademark of Jasomi Networks, Inc. All other products or services referenced may be trademarks or service marks of their respective companies or organizations.