CHURN, CHURN

To help nail down churn-prone wireless subscribers, AudioCodes has created a gateway to help carriers lock up long-term contracts with businesses that reimburse their employees for wireless minutes.

The Stretto 2000 Wireless Enterprise Media Gateway takes voice packets and recodes them into circuits capable of being carried by landline networks. When paired with a softswitch and picocells, the Stretto 2000 helps establish what is basically a wireless PBX within an enterprise's building or campus.

The gateway is currently in beta testing and should be commercially available in Q2.

Richard Poole, director of wireless solutions for AudioCodes, said wireless service providers can use Stretto to contract wireless service to an entire enterprise and its employees, preventing churn.

“You then have an operator selling to a business and capturing all of their employees on one service,” he said. “Those employees are not able to churn. If a company says everyone needs a cell phone and this is the carrier you use, then that's the benefit.”

Capable of serving GSM, UMTS and CDMA 2G and 3G calls, the gateway is a standard 1U chassis system that handles from two to 16 T-1 PCM spans for a total of 48 to 384 voice-over-packet cellular calls.

A possible limitation of such a system is that it only works with one carrier at a time. Given wireless penetration, many companies might be hesitant to force employees to switch their service provider. Poole argues, however, that enterprises will be lured by improved in-building coverage — not to mention less expensive minutes.
— Toby Weber
www.audiocodes.com