g of multimedia streams Speech recognition Speech generation from text Conference bridging Fax processing Transcoding Voice activity detection and loudness reporting Scripted combinations of the above You may have a single media server supporting multiple ap- plications servers, with applications such as voice mail, network announcements ("the number you have called is not in service at this time ") and pre-paid calling cards. The Telecom Handbook 149 CONVERGENCE OF VOICE & DATA A gateway takes the signal and digitizes it (if it is not already in a digital form); potentially compresses it, depending on the codec; packetizes it for transmission; and routes the packet to the destination. Note that all of these steps take time. This added time is called latency. Latency is one of the most important fac- tors contributing to the perceived quality of the voice transmission. Low latency results in good quality, while long latency results in poor quality. The gateway reverses the operation for packets coming from the packet network ending up on the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Both operations (coming and going) take place simultaneously at each end-point, allowing a full two-way conversation. A transcoder takes a media stream in one codec (stands for coder/decoder) and converts it to another. Media gateways take voice signals from their analog form into digital signals and vice-versa. A softswitch network may connect to the existing public switched telephone network (PSTN) in three different ways: 1. Physical media-path connections, through the circuits that connect media gateways to circuit switches. 2. Physical signaling-path connections, through the cir- cuits that connect signaling gateways to the SS7. 3. Logically, the softswitch may access network elements in the PSTN for routing, billing, emergency services and other value added services as needed by using the physical SS7 connection to exchange messages with other SS7-connected network elements. The early softswitch applications were Internet offloa