 PC is not used as the basis for the device. Instead, the system is designed and built from the ground up to support VoIP connections. The scale of these dedicated voice gateways ranges from one to approximately 4,000 channels on a single dedicated chassis. The last version of voice gateways is one that does not contain all the signaling elements in a single box and instead relies on distributed processing of the media in the voice 8 SIP Trunking gateways and the signaling aspects in a separate device. These devices then communicate via a standards-based protocol to enable the Media Gateway to be controlled by the Media Gateway Controller. The most prevalent protocols used to exchange information between the Media Gateway and the Media Gateway Controller are MGCP and H.248. MGCP was never standardized by the IETF and instead was left in a draft state. However, Cisco and other companies built and deployed many high-density media gateways that used this protocol. H.248, which has some heritage from MGCP in that it is a master/slave protocol, was ratified by the ITU and standardized. This standardization was encouraged by the large, traditional national telecommunications companies to enable interoperability between vendors. Currently, state-of-the-art voice gateways combine many features to enable connections to both TDM trunks and SIP trunks. This dual termination capability enables service providers to reuse much of their large investment in in TDM to IP gateways. However, there is no consistency or standardization as it relates to the dual use of a voice gateway to terminate both TDM and SIP Trunks. The H.248 standard does enable both TDM and IP call contexts to be created, but generally devices are not simultaneously used for both IP and TDM termination of calls. The other capability of advanced TDM to IP voice gateways is the capability to handle several protocols. The majority of deployed voice gateways in 2009 use H.323 connec- tions; however, the majority of new installations use the SIP protocol. The expec