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The move of mobile networks towards all-IP and VoIP has created a huge opportunities for companies that provide key elements of the IP network. One of these is the session border controller (SBC), which secures the edge of the operator’s network and provides call admission, security and QoS for VoIP and other packet services. Competition is mounting, and Alcatel-Lucent jumped into the market last week at Mobile World Congress. But the goalposts are moving all the time, and in the same week, SBC market leader Acme Packet was looking forward to a new category, the PEC (policy exchange controller), geared up for LTE networks.

According to research by Infonetics, SBCs enjoyed a 42% increase in revenue in 2010, compared to 2009, and an increasing proportion of this growth was driven by mobile access and fixed/mobile convergence, rather than just fixed, IP deployments.

The trend will only be accelerated by deployments of IMS-based voice for LTE, as led by Verizon Wireless – though this will not be mainstream until mid-decade or later. Another key driver is the use of SBCs to interconnect to other service providers. "The shift to IP continues, as reflected in the continued rise of SBCs and the decline in trunk media gateways in 2010,” commented analyst Diane Myers. Slowdown in the latter, and other older categories, meant the SBC was the star of the market – the overall service provider VoIP equipment sector saw revenue fall by 6.7% in 2010 to $2.21bn.

Myers added: “SBCs have become a critical element in next generation voice networks.. They have evolved into traffic managers and policy engines, taking on more and more functionality."

In the overall carrier VoIP segment, Genband is the leader with 23% share by revenue, strengthened by its acquisition of Nortel’s activities in this area last year. Its own SBC is called S3.

Among the vendors, Acme Packet is dominant in SBCs, but is facing rising competition, notably from new launches by Alcatel-Lucent, and carrier interest in embedded, rather than standalone, SBCs – favoring Cisco and Juniper. At Mobile World Congress, that led it to extend its reach beyond the conventional SBC, into the PEC, with the launch of its Net-Net Policy Director. Although Acme has coined the PEC phrase, several vendors are addressing this nascent category for products that address security, interoperability, routing and scaling tasks in all-IP networks. They allow policy information to be exchanged within LTE and IMS networks, or across LTE borders, to support data and voice roaming, policy aggregation and federated service delivery.

The PEC also denotes the rise of Diameter as the primary signaling protocol for AAA (authentication, authorization and accounting), mobility management, policy control and policy enforcement. In future, says Yankee Group, all elements of the packet core and the IMS will exchange this information using Diameter rather than older solutions like TDM and SS7. “In a major break from the TDM-based networks of the past, policy management in all-IP networks is critically dependent on how the Diameter signaling environment is architected, protected and managed,” writes analyst Brian Partridge.

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