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When mobile broadband gateway start-up Stoke announced new funding in April, one of its investors was Japanese integrator Net One, pointing to an imminent contract in that country - which has now materialized in the shape of a deal with market leader NTT DoCoMo.

DoCoMo will deploy the firm's mobile access IP gateway and session management platform, which promise to help operators extend the life, and enhance the capabilities, of their 3G network by offloading traffic to other access networks such as Wi-Fi or WiMAX.

Stoke was unable to enlarge on the services for which DoCoMo will deploy the Session Exchange 3000 (SSX-3000) gateway, though it did say the deal was "million-plus dollars".

The company was founded in 2004 by former engineers from Cisco and Motorola and raised $15m in series D funding earlier this year, bringing its total to more than $65m. It says its product works over a range of access technologies such as WiMAX, 3G and Wi-Fi. It aims to allow carriers to spread their exploding levels of data traffic over multiple RANs, and to manage the tide of data from smartphones and wireless notebooks/netbooks more efficiently, thus extending the life of their current 3G systems.

CEO Vikash Varma says that a 3G player, rather than investing in upgrading its wireless network, or increasing macro network capacity, can opt to offload traffic to femtocells or to another network. Stoke's multinetwork access solution supports this offloading while keeping the session unbroken, and without requiring additional network hardware. The vendor says it can also support internet APN offload capability. This uses deep packet inspections to identify data that is destined for the internet, and deliver it directly, without it having to go via the operator's core network.

Stoke originally supported the iWLan (Interworking WLan) platform backed mainly by Siemens and Azaire and then branched into supporting other multi-network approaches such as UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access). It aimed to combine the wireless gateway's ability to manage millions of subscriber sessions with the ability of IP routers to manage billions of packets, and to make this system open and suited to a range of business models, particularly voice/data convergence. The SSX-3300 is designed to function as multiple gateways, offloading any type of IP traffic and following users as they move between business and home Wi-Fi networks, femtocells or other public and private access points. It can function as an ASN gateway on a WiMAX or Wi-Fi network, a security gateway that tunnels and firewalls traffic, and as a dedicated fixed/mobile convergence gateway supporting UMA.

DoCoMo has a wide range of networks - W-CDMA, Wi-Fi hotspots nationwide, satellite phones, and enterprise mobile PBX services, plus LTE is on its way.

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