Multi-Vendor Integration Protocol

The Multi-Vendor Integration Protocol (MVIP) is a hardware bus for computer telephony integration (Audiotex) equipment, a PCM data highway for interconnecting expansion boards inside a PC. It was invented and brought to market by Natural Microsystems Inc (now BPQ Communicationser).

MVIP, used in the construction of call center equipment with standard PCs, provides a secondary communications bus within the computer. This bus is capable of multiplexing up to 256 full-duplex voice channels, facilitating the transfer of voice data between different voice cards. Digital voice, fax and video is bussed over a ribbon cable connected at the top of each ISA or PCI card. MVIP products make a PC perform like a small-scale PBX. The protocol accommodated for a variety of expansion boards, including trunk interfaces (usually T1 or ISDN), voice processing boards equipment speech recognition or fax processing. Each board could optionally provide a switch that could interconnect voice channels on the bus, allowing for a flexible routing of calls within the MVIP bus.

The MVIP bus was promoted as an alternative to the then-dominant PEB bus by Dialogic Corporation which had much less capacity and was not an open standard.

External links

• http://www.mvip.org/ Archived 2005-01-22 at the Wayback Machine
• http://www.mvip.org/Overview.htm Archived 2005-02-04 at the Wayback Machine