GENBAND Intros New Gateways

GENBAND Inc.’s product portfolio just keeps growing.

The company this week takes the wraps off two new wireline/wireless media gateways, the G2 Compact Media Gateway and G9 Converged Media Gateway, which work with any softswitch or CSCF.

According to Jody Bennett, vice president of marketing, GENBAND now offers “the most diverse IP portfolio on the planet.”

The G9 is the only second-generation media gateway on the market, said Bennett. This mid- to high-density trunking gateway for wireline and wireless applications is the second generation of the 8000 Converged Media Gateway, which was developed by Santera and later acquired by Tekelec. GENBAND got the 8000 through its recent acquisition of select assets from Tekelec.

The 8000 has a significant installed base. Infonetics Research recently identified the product as the world’s leading media gateway in port shipments for 2006, with a record 7 million ports shipped last year.

Bennett said the G9 employs the same software used in the 8000, which he added was a huge accelerator to market. But the G9 has new hardware, which was developed by GENBAND to reduce the cost of this product and allow it to be “open” so it can interoperate with any vendor’s controller using H.248 (the interface between media gateways and the IMS core), said Bennett.

Also new with this product is an integrated signaling gateway, so it works with all countries’ SS7 variants, thus easing deployments globally, added Bennett.

A third way in which the G9 differs from the 8000 is that the new product is “very IP centric,” said Bennett, whereas the 8000 was an ATM-based solution. Although the G9 has a 20GB IP fabric, he added, the company did retain TDM switching in the solution to allow customers to make the transition to IP at their own pace.

Scaling up to tens of thousands of ports, the G9 supports a wide range of interfaces and features for unlicensed mobile access (UMA), UMTS, GSM and CDMA 3GPP and 3GPP2 wireless networks for both access (RNC) and core (R4 MSC), and wireline and converged wireless/wireline network operators. It supports 3GPP Release 4/5/6 as well as all of the major wireless and wireline network industry protocols.

The G9 is in three customers’ labs now and is slated for commercial shipment in the third quarter.

The new G2 Compact Media Gateway, meanwhile, is a compact and hardened media gateway providing packet line and trunking media gateway capabilities for fixed and cable carriers. Homegrown at GENBAND, the product was built off of the company’s G6 Universal Media Gateway. The G6 is a very successful mid-sized gateway, but there was a need in the market for a smaller version of this product, said Bennett, so GENBAND came out with the G2. The new, hardened solution supports 24 to 720 DS0 sessions per chassis and is ideally suited for either outside plant or small central office deployments, he said.

As a packet line gateway, the G2 allows SIP application servers, softswitches and IMS core products to provide call control and features to customer lines on legacy access platforms like DLCs and certain Class 5 line frames including DCO and EWSD line frames. As a trunking gateway, the G2 enables circuit-to-packet media conversion, CALEA, E911, security and other services using H.248, MGCP or SIP-based call control. The G2, which is slated to general availability late this year, also includes an Emergency Standalone (ESA) feature to ensure that access networks maintain intrasystem and emergency calling if softswitch communications to endpoints are disrupted.

Both the G9 and the G2 will be in GENBAND’s exhibit space, Booth 2856, at NXTcomm.

GENBAND Inc. www.genband.com
Infonetics www.infonetics.com

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