NexTone goes on Asia-Pac diversion

Gaithersburg, Md.-based NexTone today announced its first major push into the Asia-Pac market, appointing former ITXC executive Diarmid Massey as managing director of Asia-Pac operations.

As part of the expansion, the company is bringing its three FlexControl applications--peering, routing and policy-based management--to an Asian voice-over-IP market that is expanding faster than any in the world. Additionally, the company announced that India’s Data Access has deployed the NexTone Multiprotocol Session Controller (MSC).

"From a product perspective, our capabilities within FlexControl give us some competitive advantage because we can focus on interconnection," said Dan Dearing, vice president of marketing for NexTone. "We’ve been very successful and have acquired about six new customers. All of those are doing slightly different interconnections."

Though the company is dividing the Asia-Pac market into four regions, China is expected to be among the most important for NexTone as well as virtually every other session border control vendor. In it announcement, the vendor pointed to China Unicom as the last VoIP operator, claiming 7.7 million minutes of daily use. Massey, who for the last six years served as managing director of ITXC’s Asia-Pac region, will oversee NexTone’s Asia from Singapore.

Among the riches potential applications is carrier-to-carrier interconnection. It’s also among the most difficult, said Dearing.

"The carrier-to-carrier type peering point is a little more sophisticated because it needs another element of routing, which carriers will use to load share among multiple partners," he said.

Data Access, for instance, has standardized on VocalTec gateways but was somewhat limited in its ability to peer with other carriers, Dearing said. With the addition of a NexTone SBC, the carrier has been able to link up with 25 new carriers.