Netrake session control targets residential VoIP market

Four-year-old Netrake, a provider of session controllers for the Tier 1 service provider market, introduced new features for its nCite platform that carriers can use to target the residential voice-over-IP market. The company also formalized its relationships with BroadSoft and Convedia through partnering agreements.

A new Hosted Firewall/NAT Traversal feature allows carriers using the nCite platform for carrier-to-carrier peering to offer residential VoIP using a single platform. The firewall protects home networks by recognizing registered end devices and performing security analysis that only allows access to authorized users. The functionality is in the carrier’s nCite platform and does not require changes in customer equipment.

The user mobility feature uses deep packet inspection of both signaling and media to recognize enterprise users and authorize their access to virtual private networks or VoIP service remotely or from a mobile device.

Built for Tier 1 carriers, Netrake’s session controllers can examine 42,000 simultaneous calls.

"Most of our competitors come from the enterprise space. So there is no one handling within 20,000 calls," said Micaela Giuhat, AVP product management for Netrake.

The platform also provides management capabilities that support auto configuration or registration, expire timer registration, oversubscription, statistics and historical data and debugging tools.

"Carriers aren’t always happy putting another element in the network, so you have to give them the right management tools," Giuhat said.

Netrake's session control products are used at Level 3 and are in trial with some of the carriers planning residential VoIP services.

Netrake also entered into a formal agreement with Convedia to deliver integrated VoIP solutions for IP-based voice and multi-media solutions. Convedia is a media server supplier. The company’s flagship products are the entry level CMS-1000 Media Server and the carrier class CMS-6000 media server. Both support a wide range of codec standards.

As a result of this partnership the companies will integrate their platforms with Netrake’s nCite platform controlling the Convedia media server in order to provide adjunct transcoding of media streams with incompatible encoding. Netrake also partnered with BroadSoft to provide secure hosted PBX and IP Centrex solutions. The companies have made their platforms interoperable. BroadSoft’s BroadWorks platform consists of a range of applications including hosted PBX, IP Centrex, residential broadband and collaborative conferencing.

"The BroadSoft and Convedia partnerships formalize our existing relationships, which makes customers feel better and shows them we can work with each other," Giuhat said. "And interoperability is a very hot topic."