vIPer™ Secure Cloud Phone Service

The Problems

Sectéra® vIPer™ phone and other secure phone customers often have issues operating from their on-premises secure location with their local telephone switches and/or their organization’s designated telecom provider.  The SIP-based local telephone switches and/or telecom providers typically do not understand V.150.1 and related aspects in SDP negotiations.  Hence end-to-end calls are relegated to use the lowest common denominator of G.711 communications of modem signals which is often un-reliable unless the organization has a premium connection to a telephone service provider connected to the nation’s telecom backbone.

The real culprit faced by secure phone customers is operation over lossy packet networks even if the loss rate is very minimal. Data modem and fax machine operations typically do not work well in these environments unless special handling is provided.  In some installations, a telecom provider offers a high grade, near lossless G.711 service which usually works well for fax operations.  In most installations, however, fax has to be handled by a T.38 capable Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA).  VOCAL supports data (and fax) modem operations with its Analog Modem Adapter (AMA) which may be useful for some vIPer™ phone and other secure communications installations.

The VOCAL Cloud Server Solution

VOCAL’s SPRAG solves these problems (and others) by being cloud located with an MPLS connection to a major domestic telecom carrier.  All the major domestic carriers (AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Level3 and Inteliquent) are well interconnected themselves.  G.711 modem calls work well on these networks as VOCAL has demonstrated for years with its SAMS (SIP Analog Modem Server) and FoIP/T.38 gateways it has offered to other customers.

SPRAG works with secure phone devices as a secure voice gateway to these public telecom carriers.  V.150.1 protocols are used in secure mode with the vIPer™ phone over the potentially lossy network connections from the secure customer to VOCAL’s SPRAG server.  Once at VOCAL’s server, the G.711 modulated signals are exchanged with the other endpoint without loss (assuming the other endpoint has its own robust high-quality G.711 connection).

It should be noted that VOCAL’s SPRAG has been successfully used by over hundred customer terminals.  Network connections varied from the ordinary terrestrial-based packet networks to cellular 4G/5G networks.  It is expected that satellite-based networks should also be equally capable of supporting SPRAG interconnection of secure vIPer™ phones.

VOCAL SPRAG has been used over a wide variety of transports, including Satellite services such as Inmarsat, Viasat and Starlink.