What is a Demarcation Point or Point of Demarcation (POD)? A clear way to explain this term would be, “the physical point at which the public network of a telecommunications company ends and the private network of a customer begins”. Sounds simple? In real-life deployments we find many cases where this point can be quite elusive and unclear causing many issues, both to the service provider and to the end customer.

In order to understand this a little better, we will demonstrate a few cases depicting what a typical enterprise installation looks like.

In most cases, a collection of boxes are provided by various vendors, either owned by the customer or alternatively by the service provider. Among these, we find a WAN access device, a Router, a data security device such as a Firewall, a LAN switch, a voice gateway connecting the office PBX, and a Session Border Controller for enhanced voice traffic security.

It’s quite clear that due to lack of service or technical problems this scenario can end up in useless “finger pointing” by several equipment vendors or service providers. It would be almost impossible to nail down the problem which can be in any of the installed devices. This would cause tremendous frustration for the user who is paying for service and support, and will most likely result in blaming the service provider for poor service and lack of support – definitely not the desired outcome for any service provider.

Let’s look at the same scenario from the service provider’s point of view: if your service is dependent on so many devices supplied by a number of vendors you are bound to suffer from integration pains caused by complex cabling or interoperability issues. Using a selection of remote management tools for each appliance which your staff has to master, results in an extensive and expensive training period and makes troubleshooting an agonizing process (actually, almost impossible in case you do not own or control all elements). On top of this, your ability to assure quality of service or perform according to a strict Service Level Agreement (SLA) is questionable since you cannot practically control the network which your delivered service relies on.

This clearly requires a change in the customer premise equipment and in the ownership and control structure which is the essence of the Mediant™ 1000 MSBG, the newly introduced Multi-Service Business Gateway by AudioCodes. Combining all elements available in the customer premise into a unified, integrated box is clearly the optimal solution for the challenges described above. With an MSBG, the service provider can install a single box (avoiding cabling, interoperability and integration pains), have a single management tool (simplifying troubleshooting and shortening training time), have ownership of the installed equipment or at least full control (ensuring QOS). All of the above results in a higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

A service provider using AudioCodes Mediant 1000 MSBG can offer Value Added Services such as conferencing, recording, unified messaging or IP-PBX all running on the built-in Open Solution Network Server (OSN) and voice network) enriching its offer and generating additional revenue.

The MSBG lays out a much more efficient, reliable and cost-effective way to launch services to business customers by better defining a new and highly integrated point of demarcation.