Bridgewater provides triple-A to Virgin Mobile

For its introduction of high-speed data services, Virgin Mobile USA has licensed Bridgewater Systems’ AAA Service Controller to support its account management, authentication and authorization requirements. Virgin also licensed additional software for security and data session routing.

Bridgewater’s policy-based service controller ensures that only Virgin Mobile users or other authorized users can access content. The company’s mediation software provides optimal routing of Virgin Mobile’s customer data sessions and interconnection with other service providers.

The Virgin Mobile sale is important to Bridgewater, said Ed Ogonek, president and CEO of Bridgewater Systems, because it shows the company can serve the fastest growing wireless operator in the U.S. and it gives the company a strong proof-point in the MVNO space. Virgin Mobile’s mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) has allowed it to grow to more than 2 million wireless subscribers.

Bridgewater’s relationship is directly with Virgin Mobile rather than Sprint, which supplies the network infrastructure.

Ottawa, Ontario-based Bridgewater Systems has signed 10 new customers since June, including VeriSign and Cricket Communications. VeriSign will use Bridgewater’s service controller in its Wireless Data Roaming Service, a transaction-based service for interoperability and roaming for data users.

VeriSign is using both the service controller and Bridgewater’s mediation capability to provide service across a broad set of smaller service providers.

Selling into this variety service provider bodes well for Bridgewater’s future, Ogonek said. "We now have a direct sell model, the MVNO model and the service bureau model, which provides an interesting approach to growing the business as the market evolves," he said.

The company’s AAA Service Controller supports these policy management services for user access based on the RADIUS protocols for CDMA, GPRS, Wi-Fi, DSL and dial networks. It supports more than 30 million provisioned users and one billion transactions per month and has been involved in the launch of 18 CDMA2000 1x networks in North and South America. Its customers include Verizon Wireless, Bell Mobility, Covad and Telia.

"The core of our offering is the AAA Service Controller, but we provide a growing set of applications around that including pre-paid, push-to-talk, CALEA, presence integration and mediation. Just about every customer starts from that base of the service controller then evolves to that broader application set," Ogonek said.