AT&T Network Systems has announced four intelligent network products on which telephone companies can deploy and test new services, regardless of which vendor supplied the telephone exchange. And, according to AT&T, BellSouth Corp is one of the first takers, having signed a five year contract for the products. The A-I-Net product range comprises Service Control Point, a network database of call control and routing information, and the instructions needed to activate a new service; Service Circuit Node, which controls and connects calls to advanced service circuits that execute new services – such as voice messaging, facsimile store and forward, speech recognition and multimedia; and Service Management System, a management system that enables the telephone company to test, administer and provision new service deployment. The system is based on AT&T’s common Operations Systems environment, and will be compatible with Bell Communications Research’s Operation Systems Computing Architecture. Service Creation Environment runs on a Sun Microsystems workstation, and enables service providers to create, test, and deploy customer services. The other products run on AT&T’s fault-tolerant StarServer FT Unix system.
