Sandvine, Acme Packet push into broadband wireless

As the wireless industry moves solidly toward a broadband world, it is beginning to attract companies that have historically played in the wired broadband DSL and cable markets.

This week, Sandvine is showcasing a service control platform, called the PTS 14700, aimed at tier-1 mobile operators designed to give operators visibility into subscriber data trends and consumption, opening the door to new customized services such as quota management, value-based billing, advice-of-charge, and content zones that facilitate and encourage more mobile data usage.

Sandvine is demonstrating the platform over WiMAX in conjunction with Nortel this week.

"This creates advantages in rapid service creation and innovation," said Tim Donnelly, co-founder and executive vice president of marketing. "The data component is increasing in popularity and creating an opportunity to leverage better applications and subscriber behavior to create new services."

Sandvine has been around for six years, targeting the fixed broadband market. The PTS 14700 is an evolution of its already proven platform in that space. "We've had terrific take up in the wireline environment and started to engage wireless operators that have different characteristics: lower data rates but higher subscriber counts," Donnelly said.

Another prominent fixed-line company is making bigger inroads into the wireless market this week. Acme Packet, a session border control solution provider, is introducing its Open Session Routing (OSR) architecture and products along with an ecosystem of partners to deliver SIP-based fixed-mobile convergence.

The OSR architecture features Acme Packet's Net-Net Session Router, a session routing proxy, working with routing database products and services from Acme Packet's ecosystem partners.

"Tier-one wireless and wireline service providers are looking for more open, scalable and cost-effective core session routing solutions that can evolve as their networks do," said Seamus Hourihan, vice president of marketing and product management at Acme Packet. "Several tier-one deployments of Acme Packet's Open Session Routing solution signal an impending sea change away from monolithic, session-stateful products to session-stateless routing proxies leveraging best-of-breed routing databases."