Private IP telephony backbone linking widely-distributed enterprise sites

摘要

A hybrid IP backbone network spans geographic locations of two or more publicly-switched telephone networks and includes nodes with translation servers adapted to translate between data protocols compatible with the PSTNs and a data protocol compatible with the IP backbone network. Calls placed in one PSTN then may be routed to an IP node, translated to data-packet protocol, through the IP backbone to a second node having another translation server, and therethrough into another PSTN and thence to a final destination. In some embodiments data gateways and trunk gateways are also provided at and integrated with IP nodes in the IP backbone network.