Acme Packet controlling the borders for China Unicom

Acme Packet answered recent Tier 1 deployment announcements by competitors with a big win of its own this week. China Unicom, one of the largest service providers in that country, will use Acme Packet's Net-Net session border controllers in its national, multi-service network.

The Net-Net products, initially the Session Director product, will be integrated with China Unicom's existing IP network and a next-generation softswitch platform from Alcatel Shanghai Bell, which also will provide system integration work on behalf of Acme Packet. The Alcatel subsidiary has relationships with every service provider in China.

Some of those relationships, as yet unannounced, include Acme Packet. "Alcatel Shanghai Bell is very successful in China," said Seamus Hourihan, vice president of marketing and product management ay Acme Packet.

China Unicom has already begun deployment and will roll out Acme Packet's SBCs to 50 of its 300 served cities across China over the next couple of months. China Unicom will add video conferencing and other multimedia services to the voice-over-IP and data services running on its existing backbone network.

A key feature in the Net-Net product line is its ability to route traffic by codec, which Hourihan said is an important differentiator. "Not many people in our space can do that," he said. The second phase of the project will include hosted NAT traversal and multi-protocol support for China Unicom's roll out of hosted IP services. Overall, it is one of Acme Packet's largest deployments. Its largest customer to date has deployed approximately 80 systems and Hourihan expect this deployment to be of that magnitude, although he cautioned that it all depends on the success of the service provider.

"Providers initially put in an initial infrastructure and as they add subscribers they add systems, so our success is predicated in the long term on the success of our service provider customers," Hourihan said.

In addition to its codec routing ability, Hourihan said scalability was an important factor in winning the business. Chinese competitors don't have the necessary scale and propose using many more boxes in a distributed architecture. "The downside to that is you have a lot more elements to manage, which means higher operational costs," he said.

Earlier this month, Infonetics Research listed Acme Packet as the market share leader in terms of number of sessions and units shipped (74% in the second half of 2004) as well as revenue. "I hope this makes it even more lopsided," Hourihan said.

Acme Packet now claims 29 Tier 1 service providers.