General Bandwidth expands, contracts, moves north

General Bandwidth this week announced a new name, a new headquarters and a new expansion in product set. Other than that, there's nothing new.

The newly christened Genband officially makes its debut with a new portfolio of IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) architecture and multimedia products including a signaling controller and applications server designed to fit with the company's flagship G6 Media Gateway. The company also is starting to focus more of its effort on the residential services market, said Jody Bennett, vice president of marketing for the vendor.

"We're entering a significant new phase of the company," he said.

Among the most noteworthy elements is the signaling controller, dubbed C2, which allows carriers deploying session initiation protocol (SIP) to have full access to SS7 services. Additionally it provides full support for PRI and MF-CAS trunks to send calls to and from the public network. The new application server, marketed as the S4, fills out Genband's product line and gives carriers a way to offer residential and small businesses SIP-based services.

As an aside, the company also is now talking about the quiet acquisition of Syndeo Corp. it made last year. The softswitch vendor gives Genband a lot more presence in the cable telephony market. The company already has brought the cost curve down on Syndeo's product by porting it to a carrier-grade Linux platform, Bennett said.

"You're going to see a big push from us in cable this year," he said.

Finally, the company announced a move of its headquarters from Austin, Texas, to Plano, Texas, into the former DSC Communications office and is unveiling a new tagline of "Beyond Voice." The move north to Plano is spurred in part by the vendor's desire to take advantage of the huge pool of engineers with telecom experience in the area.