Acme Packet promises 'quick start' on road to IMS

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Acme Packet promises 'quick start' on road to IMS

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 13 February, 2010

READ MORE: Acme Packet | Core Network | Standards

Fixed and mobile carriers want to move their networks and services to all-IP, but few know exactly how they are going to get there. The approved textbook route is, of course, to deploy an IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) - which decouples the services from the physical layer and allows apps to be delivered at huge scale over fixed and wireless systems, using SIP end-to-end. But this is a huge undertaking, with the kind of cost, risk and complexity only the largest operator could envisage (Verizon Wireless is one of the most advanced). Everyone else is looking for a simplified, step-by-step route, and Acme Packet, best known for its session border controllers (SBCs), is promising just that.

There are many 'gentle' approaches to all-IP. Some are cutdown IMS platforms, coming from the large core suppliers themselves, notably Cisco. Others are industry alliance efforts, like the OpenVoice initiative, which provides a simplified way to deploy IMS voice in LTE; or RCS (Rich Communications Services), which allows operators to deploy just a few key IMS services like video calling. Acme Packet's director of solutions marketing, Kevin Mitchell believes all these are important for helping the mobile industry catch up with progress made on the wireline IP side, but his firm is taking a different, though complementary, approach.

Mitchell promises a 'quick start' IMS for carriers that use its SBCs at the edge of their VoIP systems. Among three new products, the Acme Packet Net-Net SIP Multimedia-Xpress (SMX) platform aims to simplify the delivery of 'RCS and IMS-equivalent' services and is targeted at tier two or three providers, or large carriers rolling out to limited populations. Then further products - Net-Net 4500 Session-aware Load Balancer (SLB) and Net-Net SBC Clusters - allow the initial roll-out to be scaled up for bases of millions of users.

The first product supports delivery of key IMS services like voice at a cost of $2 to $3 per subscriber for as few as 100,000 subscribers, far cheaper than a full IMS - which would generally be cost prohibitive for a small roll-out. This offers an alternative to the "fully decomposed IMS infrastructure" - breaking the full-blown IMS into a series of separate boxes, one for each IMS element, which can be mixed and matched according to the operator's business priorities. This simplifies the hardware and virtualizes key IMS interfaces. SMX is based on the firm's existing Net-Net 4500 SD access SBC, which already includes IMS functions such as P-CSCF, E-CSCF and C-BGF. Acme also goes beyond the standard by adding a SIP signalling firewall.

To scale up, Acme Packet is offering carriers with large numbers of SBCs - as many as 500 - the ability to use those systems more efficiently. They can be grouped in clusters, spreading web apps across multiple boxes while maintaining the sessions - which is essential for SIP, but not achieved by most load balancers. Management and distribution of up to 2m routes per SBC is automated and consolidated.