This tutorial is based on a white paper written by Gursharan Sidhu, Senior VP of Engineering and CTO, Co-Founder, NexVerse Inc. and Thomas A. Ladd, Director, Voice Over IP Engineering, Global Network Engineering, Cable & Wireless, Inc.

Overview
Network convergence is rapidly moving beyond transport, impacting how the telecommunications industry can meet the demands of today's digitally empowered users. The network will need to provide always-on network service wherever subscribers communicate—local, remote, or mobile. To be dynamic and affordable, these new services must move beyond the limits of the current central office (CO) architecture, delivering flexibility from anywhere on the service provider network. Basic network infrastructure is evolving to handle these requirements, but a new kind of flexible software control must deliver uniform services wherever subscribers live and work. This new distributed control is the basis of the "network office."

This tutorial examines the softswitch-based network architecture required to realize the new network office, describes the types of faults that can impact its availability, and discusses techniques that can be used to achieve high availability.