Yes, it's still primarily a black phone/TDM kind of world, but the softswitch has arrived and is starting to make its presence felt. Plenty of calls you make are trunk-switched by Class 4 replacement switches. And even if you're in the camp that says Class 5 feature replication is a lot harder than it looks, the fact is that there are real, honest-to-gosh Class 5 replacement switches out there in the field this very instant (see, for instance, Coppercom's announcement in our news-in-brief roundup).

More than that, it's increasingly clear that the real center of the next generation network, from the carrier point of view, is the softswitch. Though there has been plenty of debate on exact details of what a softswitch is, we've become increasingly convinced of at least two things. First, what softswitch really describes is an architecture with several key pieces. And second, that no matter whether the state of the economy slows or hastens migration to converged telephony, we will see more and more softswitches incorporated into the public network as time goes by.

With that in mind, we've collected a special section of materials related to softswitches and the broader softswitch ecosystem:

• Softswitches Get Serious first appeared in the August edition of Communications Convergence, but has been updated here. It's a broad overview of what the softswitch market looks like today.

• What Makes a Softswitch a Softswitch is my rather brisk attempt to lay definitional controversies to rest.

• Our Softswitch Vendor Roundup is as comprehensive as any we've seen and a quick read-through will convince you that softswitches are one of the most happening areas in telephony right now. Of course, if you're in the market for a softswitch or a partnership with a softswitch vendor, this is the place to start your search.

• For an insight into where at least some parts of some softswitches come from (no, not softstorks), check The Soft Inside the Switch.

• Recent Softswitch News in Brief brings you, well...

• And last but not least, please join us for an ongoing discussion of softswitches in our roundtable.