Bridgewater boosts interoperability in NGNs

Bridgewater is continuing to expand its partner and interoperability environment with the announcement today at the Cisco Live 2010 event in Las Vegas that it has successfully completed interoperability testing with the Cisco ASR 5000 mobile packet core solution for 3G and 4G networks.

With the announcement, Bridgewater hopes to reduce the cost of deploying network equipment through a vendor-neutral, standards-based control plane based on Diameter and 3GPP interfaces. Bridgewater’s “control-plane-in-a-box” system for the long-term evolution (LTE) evolved packet core (EPC) has gained significant market traction with partners and several Tier 1 operators globally in the past few months.

“We see [requests for proposals] from large service providers that are very specific about vendor-neutral, independent control planes, as they want to have the ability to decouple the intelligence in the network from underlying core infrastructure — especially in complicated, multi-vendor broadband networks,” said David Sharpley, senior vice president of marketing and product management for Bridgewater. “The pre-integration is intended to further help service providers accommodate quickly changing policies, add new services, launch tiered services and enable different revenue-generating components in an expedited fashion.”

By removing the tight coupling between control and forwarding planes within routing equipment, operators can scale when building out networks without worrying that services on the same equipment will affect one another, thus disrupting processing stability. “I believe the market is moving toward stand-alone, software-based policy control solutions, but there’s still a definite role for policy capabilities in network gear, which is what Cisco and Bridgewater seem to be banking on with this partnership,” said Shira Levine, directing analyst, next-gen OSS and policy, with Infonetics Research.

Bridgewater is providing its Policy Controller and Home Subscriber Server for Cisco so that operators can leverage an end-to-end mobile packet core solution with all key core and control plane components. “The interoperability testing of our previously acquired Starent product line across the HSS and PCRF will help service providers deploy across an evolved packet core with more seamless integration as they move from 3G to 4G networks,” Sharpley said.

Bridgewater’s Policy Controller acts as a fully compliant 3GPP PCRF and can be deployed in both 3G UMTS/HSPA networks and the LTE EPC. The Policy Controller can also be deployed in proprietary network architectures in conjunction with deep packet inspection solutions.

The new announcement is no surprise, as there are still rumors of Cisco possibly trying to acquire Bridgewater, though their spokespeople both denied comment.