ECG Completes Major BroadWorks Upgrade at Centennial Puerto Rico - ECG

This week, ECG completed a major upgrade of the VoIP Call Control platform at Centennial de Puerto Rico. Centennial provides VoIP, traditional (5ESS) and Wireless (PCS/CDMA) telephony services to customers and resellers in Puerto Rico. The VoIP platform is built on BroadWorks.

Centennial PR upgraded from BroadWorks Release 14sp3 to Release 14sp9. The coordination of the upgrade is complex with numerous interconnected components:

• The Nortel Communication Server 2000 provides SS7 PSTN access for BroadWorks.
• The Convergy's Ceon platform is integrated with BroadWorks for provisioning.
• The Acme Packet SD provides security and session management features both for Hosted PBX VoIP and for IP Trunking to several carriers.
• Centennial's CONUS-based Billing Department receives CDRs from six different BroadWorks application servers.
• Many tens-of-thousands Scientific Atlanta MGCP/NCS eMTAs are integrated with BroadWorks
• The mPathix voicemail system is integrated with BroadWorks.
• VoIP Customer Premise equipment from Cisco, Adtran, Linksys, Polycom, and Digium/Asterisk are used in numerous configurations.

"The BroadWorks software activation is the simple part," according to project engineer Mark Lindsey. "The complexity comes in verifying the software will work with all of the integrated components." The upgrade from BroadWorks R14sp3 to R14sp9 involves several hundred individual changes. ECG analyzed each change to ensure it would not create a problem in Centennial's specific network, and designed and conducted regression tests to be used in the system upgrade.