Session border controllers have become one of the hottest topics in the VoIP infrastructure arena. One of the key points of discussion is how these products will ultimately be integrated with other IP telephony equipment such as softswitches, and what that means for the session border controller vendors.
Key players in the session border control space include Acme Packet, Jasomi Networks, Kagoor Networks, Netrake, Newport Networks Ltd. and NexTone Communications. Also, softswitch vendor Sonus Networks recently added session border control functions to its product.
“The Nortels, Siemens, Alcatels are starting to figure out how they’re going to play in the market,” says Christine Hartman, vice president of VoIP markets for Probe Group. “I think we will see some acquisitions of session border control vendors by larger vendors this year or early next. The market is going to start shaking out because companies like MCI are going to start putting out RFPs” and are looking for total solutions and economies of scale.
“The incumbent [vendors] are going to have to get into this, but they’re getting into this kicking and screaming because they have an existing business for media gateways,” adds Hartman, who says that session border controllers sell for about half that of media gateways.
Of course, media gateways handle IP-to-TDM conversion and vice versa, while session border controllers typically manage the handoff of IP traffic between enterprise and service provider networks or between different service provider networks. But Hartman says VoIP communications are becoming widespread enough that service providers want to do direct IP handoffs of their traffic without having to go back through the TDM-based PSTN, so media gateways and session border controllers have in effect become competing products.
| Voice over Packet Factoid |
| Probe Group predicts that by the end of 2008,nearly 27 percent of the global fixed line market will be using voice over packet technology. |
In further evidence that session controller functionality is expected to become a feature of more extensive solutions going forward, Jasomi Networks at the VON show in March gave the first demonstrations of an embeddable version of its PeerPoint solution. The embedded edition is targeted at vendors of softswitches, gateways, firewalls and IP PBXs that want session border controller functionality inside their products.
In other Jasomi news, the company launched enhanced mid-call media encryption; extended call logging (to allow per-call log control across a network of PeerPoint units to meet CALEA and SEC auditing regulations); and improved protocol repair, hot failover support, SOCKS5 proxy support for its PeerPoint product. Jasomi also recently announced it has added Packetalk, which is using the PeerPoint network address translation (NAT) traversal solution for VoIP, to its list of customers.
At SUPERCOMM next month, NexTone plans to announce a tool called the iVMS that will simplify and automate the management of its session border controllers.
| The NexTone iVMS |
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For iVMS, NexTone has integrated its existing network management capabilities with a central database to handle one-step provisioning so the system can automatically configure multiple controllers at one, rather than provisioning them one by one as some devices like routers are set up to do. NexTone will charge around $15 per port/call for iVMS.
“It just highlights that because NexTone has had a lot of carrier deployment, we’re at a different stage of network deployment” than competing session controller vendors, says Dan Dearing, vice president of marketing for NexTone, which has more than 100 customers including Level 3 Communications, iBasis, ITXC and now PointOne. “One of the areas of scale that is required is just from the operational standpoint. Scale is an issue that I think a lot of session border controller companies don’t look at.”
In another recent development addressing scale on the session border controller front, Acme Packet unveiled a new upgrade to its Net-Net Cluster, which comprises one Session Router and two to eight Session Directors in a logical stack. The Net-Net Cluster provides up to eight times the capacity of a single Session Director (up to 256,000 simultaneous sessions), which Acme Packet says makes it “the highest performing, most scalable and highly available session border controller in the industry.”
Also at SUPERCOMM, Kagoor Networks, which has more than 40 customers, plans to discuss details about its CALEA compliance strategy. Also, this spring, Kagoor expects to announce new partnerships and customers, including some Tier 1 and Tier 2 carrier announcements, says Jim Greenway, vice president of marketing.
The CALEA discussion, he adds, may include the announce-ment of some partnerships, possibly including companies in the signaling and/or mediation and collection arenas, Greenway says.
And addressing the new popularity of residential VoIP, Netrake recently announced its solution to support residential VoIP. The new functionality gives the Netrake products the ability to pass voice traffic through residential firewalls and NATs.
