NETRAKE GAINS ENTRANCE INTO AOL, WEST, GENESYS VIA LEVEL 3

The gong heard from AOL's voice-over-IP announcement with Level 3 Communications last week at the Voice on the Net Conference echoed across the session border controller, or SBC, market, much to the delight of Netrake, which back-slid into what could eventually be one of the industry's biggest residential VoIP implementations.

Netrake has been Level 3's provider of SBC gear for more than two years and has been working with the provider on the AOL business case for much of the last year, said Mark Neider, director of product marketing for Netrake.

“With the millions of sessions they will need to keep active, AOL wants a solid solution that can scale,” Neider said. “Scalability is what sets us apart.”

Level 3 also brought Netrake into a new market altogether by signing deals with call center providers West Corp. and Genesys Conferencing. Netrake developed a Call Center Solution as part of the implementation to help these companies lower their connectivity costs, enhance security, increase the efficiency of call routing and gain access to advanced VoIP features.

West selected Netrake to save on toll charges by using a feature for IP-to-IP bypass of the public switched network. Genesys will use Netrake's nCite session controller to secure and lock down its points of presence from unauthorized access.

The resulting Call Center Solution also features enhancement tailored for its newly targeted market, including network address translation/firewall traversal and denial of service attack prevention at both the SIP signaling and VoIP media layers, transparent interworking among SIP-based and H.323-based networks operated by call center peer networks, and IP media convergence.

On its own, Netrake signed competitive carriers Metropolitan Telecommunications and Orlando Telephone last week. Netrake will support MetTel's launch of secure peering and enterprise-facing SIP-based VoIP applications as it expands from its Northeastern base to California and the Midwest and Southwest this year.

Orlando Telephone will use Netrake's nCite solution in its residential and business VoIP launch. Netrake will provide the CLEC support for remote, automated configuration of VoIP customer premises equipment through its nCite element management system (EMS). The EMS provides visibility into call quality monitoring metrics including availability and latency.

Netrake wasn't the lone beneficiary of last week's quickened adoption of SBC solutions. In addition to partnering with AudioCodes on a new media transcoding solution resulting in a Transcoding Media Firewall option for its session controller platforms, NexTone Communications announced that U.K.-based VoIP interconnection provider Band-X has deployed its Multiprotocol Session Controller to expand its VoIP services portfolio Kagoor announced that Swisscom will use its VoiceFlow 3000 SBC to enable Swisscom's new Bluewin Phone consumer broadband offering for DSL-based VoIP and video services.

Not to be outdone, Acme Packet signed Norway's Telenor and Texas' NuVox Communications as SBC customers. Acme Packet also claimed market share leadership in terms of number of sessions and units shipped and revenue, according Infonetics Research latest numbers from February.

Acme Packet now claims 29 Tier 1 service providers and, according to Infonetics, commanded a 74% market share in number of sessions in the second half of 2004. Depending on how fast these Tier 1s or new players like AOL ramp up, the market lead could be up for grabs. Acme also introduced a new security framework called Net-SAFE (session aware filtering enforcement) for its border control products.

“A security framework needs to be in place for SBCs to deliver all their capabilities to a customer,” said Patricia Streilein, director of product management for Acme Packet.

Finally, Jasomi signed two customers: Go2Call, a hosted VoIP provider, and iNuntius, a unified messaging provider, for NAT and firewall traversal.

WHO'S BUYING SBCs?

NETRAKE

Level 3
AOL
West Corp.
Genesys Conferencing
MetTel
Orlando Telephone

ACME PACKET

Telenor
NuVox

KAGOOR

Swisscom
ISN Telecom
I2Telecom

NEXTONE

Band-X
Deltathree

JASOMI

Go2Call
iNuntius
Microsoft