Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) products in various forms has been available for about a decade. To date, VoIP enjoys a market share of less than 10% of the US residential voice market. For a number of reasons, VoIP growth is about to begin a dramatic, "hockey stick" growth curve. At the forefront of this development is the softswitch. Firstly, legacy time division multiplexing (TDM) switches such as the Lucent 5ESS or the Nortel DMS series are no longer being sold in any quantity in the US market. The last "fleet" sale of such switches was to the "old" AT&T in 1998. The giants of the telecommunications switch industry (Nortel and Alcatel-Lucent, for example) have long since moved on to promoting their VoIP-oriented softswitches. Secondly, incumbent telcos large and small seek "investment protection" for the billions of dollars of TDM switches in their inventories through various technology band aids. However, the harsh reality is that the majority of US-based TDM switches will have to be replaced in the next 5 years if their service providers are to remain competitive as the telecom world moves to Internet Protocol-based technologies. Finally, the emergence of new IP-base service providers drives demand for all-IP networks utilizing softswitch for voice services.

This boiler plate request for proposal (RFP) has been used by large and small telecommunications companies in the US and Latin America including incumbent network operators making the switch to softswitch. The use of this RFP spares the services provider many man-weeks necessary to write its own detailed RFP. More importantly, this RFP poses the right questions that can mean the difference between triumph and disaster to the requesting party. Service providers who have used this softswitch RFP for their multimillion-dollar evaluations and purchases have expressed a high degree of satisfaction in the RFP and the purchases they made based on the guidance contained in the RFP.