Stoke builds momentum with mobile broadband gateway

Start-up Stoke’s mobile broadband gateways have started to gain traction with 3G and 4G operators. In recent months, shipments of the Stoke Session Exchange have ramped up, as key customers in Japan and Korea have begun deploying it. But Stoke is also seeing interest in North America, where several operators are testing its gateway, including AT&T (NYSE:T).

In mid July, Stoke shipped its 100th SSX gateway, more than two years after its initial release. Since then Stoke has added another 20 gateway sales and is on target to sell 200 of the platforms by year end, said Stoke CEO Vikash Varma. The SSX is a massively scalable mobile broadband gateway, which can be used to terminate femtocells, aggregate base stations and redirect Internet-traffic from the operator’s network before it reaches the core.

To put the shipments in perspective, 100 fully configured gateways could support 24 million femtocells or aggregate 1.6 terrabits per second of mobile data traffic, the capacity equivalent of 60,000 4G base stations. Stoke’s key customer, NTT DoCoMo (NYSE:DCM), is using the gateway for both purposes: connecting femto traffic back to its network and aggregating the expected voluminous traffic from its new long-term evolution (LTE) network.

Stoke’s only other announced customer is Korea Telecom, which uses the SSX as a mobility anchor, but Varma said the SSX is in the networks and labs of multiple operators in North America and Asia. AT&T currently has the SSX in its development labs, though it has not yet committed to commercially deploying it. Like its Asian counterparts, though, AT&T has seen huge surges in 3G traffic, primarily driven by the Apple (NYSE:AAPL) iPhone.

So far, none of Stoke’s customers has deployed the SSX as a mobile data offload gateway, which would help spare operators massive upgrades to their 3G cores as mobile data traffic scales upwards. Varma, however, said that offload is still a relatively new technology compared to data aggregation and femto termination. Carriers are still evaluating it, he said, but Varma expects the first commercial deployments of the SSX in its offload configuration soon.

“There’s a lot of herd mentality in the wireless industry,” Varma said. “The leaders jump in first, and then the rest follow. My feeling is we’re starting to see the beginning of that.”