Twisted Pair announces general availability of WAVE 3.0
Seattle-based unified communications technology provider Twisted Pair this week announced the general availability of WAVE 3.0, the latest version of its unified group communications platform that is designed to work in mission-critical environments for the military, public safety and high-priority enterprises.
While the WAVE software platform has long enabled communications between disparate devices—from analog two-way radios to VoIP phones—version 3.0 includes a “super node” feature that helps improve the resiliency and reliability of the solution, said James Mustarde, Twisted Pair’s director of corporate marketing.
Routing of traffic on the network in a given geographic area is done via a super node, but any device can act as a super node, and the super-node designation can switch between devices, so there is no single point of failure in the network, Mustarde said during an interview with MRT.
“The beauty of super nodes is that it’s done automatically,” he said. “The network says, ‘This truck is a routing node—a super node—and it’s a central point for the current network and various types of communications are being routed through this point. If that node fails, then the system automatically determines the next best route. … It self-heals and says, ‘OK, part of the network is down. I’m simply going to reroute traffic around the problem in real time’—without any need for human intervention.
“As you and I are talking, you barely notice that a major element of our network just went out. That is exceptionally cool, and you cannot do that in hardware—it’s just not possible.”
Mustarde said the transport technology used in delivering communications is irrelevant to WAVE, which can work with any form of transport, which is important in an environment requiring interoperability between users on disparate networks.
“Nothing’s going to enable you to call somebody if you don’t have the hardware at the endpoint,” Mustarde said. “What we’re saying is that, if you have the luxury of a radio or a cell phone—and, with our technology, it doesn’t matter what type of end hardware you have, as long as you have access to the network with that device—it’s going to transport using WAVE. As long as there’s a way, WAVE will get the traffic through.”
WAVE’s ability to integrate radio communications with other forms of communication has attracted attention from customers like Mumbai International Airport in India, which selected Nortel Network’s WAVE-powered solution for its communications system.
“At the end of the day, there’s very little to choose between IP telephony from Avaya, from Nortel, or Cisco,” Mustarde said. “The reason Nortel won it was because Mumbai Airport could put radio integration on their IP network—they could use IP telephones to talk to a guy on a radio.
“The true differentiating capability of their bid was the fact that, on IP phones they bought from Nortel, they could run WAVE clients to talk to ground radio traffic, and change business practices and procedures as a result.”
