The basic building blocks of the system are ShoreGear voice switches, which are intelligent devices that provide both gateway and call management functionality. ShoreGear voice switches are purpose-built devices that run an embedded, real-time operating system, each delivering 99.999% reliability ensuring dial tone - the most critical business application.

Even more significantly, the call control software is distributed to each and every voice switch, eliminating any single point of failure. In the unlikely event a ShoreGear voice switch does fail, the other switches on the network automatically take on the call-processing load. There is no server involved with the basic telephony, thus the system delivers levels of availability unmatched by even legacy vendors.

And even though there are multiple ShoreGear voice switches distributed to locations across the network, they communicate as peers on the network using an enhanced version of the Sessions Initiation Protocol (SIP). The resulting solution is a single system delivering 100% feature transparency between locations.

ShoreGear voice switches are available in five different models to meet the needs of small, medium and large offices supporting IP phones, analog phones, analog trunks and digital trunks. And since the design is inherently scalable, there are no hardware break points and associated "forklift" upgrades - the system architecture scales infinitely, and the product has been certified to 10,000 ports in a single system.