Acme Packet offers ‘net-net’ gain in IP inter-networking

Acme Packet has unveiled a family of products called Net-Net Session Aware Networking that it says enables high-quality, end-to-end interactive communications across multiple service provider and enterprise networks, emulating the way voice calls now span multiple circuit-switched local and long distance networks by overcoming routing and media control deficiencies of today’s IP networks.

Net-Net is intended for service providers as a “premium” delivery offering, said Jim Hourihan, Acme Packets’ vice president of marketing and product management.

“Our focus is on a number of issues that relate to porting across IP networks,” said Hourihan.

This includes letting service providers build islands of IP trunking networks that use softswitches and gateways for less expensive transport services for circuit-switched originated traffic. This allows the service providers to interconnect those networks and further extend their reach.

“That’s a service provider voice-over-IP trunking application where we provide a number of capabilities--things like cost- and quality-based routing, call admission control, a transit link and a number of security functions that protect these networks from one another,” Hourihan said.

A primary piece of the family of products is security.

“If a provider is collecting money for premium communications like voice and video and has an SLA around that, he wants to make sure that that gets through first,” said Hourihan.

The Net-Net product family “tightly integrates” four functional elements required to enable communications across IP networks, including the following:

* Routing policy and network constraints that define, collect and propagate parameters for routing and admission control decisions, including quality of service [QoS] and cost.

* Session routing and signaling to select and set up the best route for each session.

* Media directing and control to authorize and steer media over selected routes with proper QoS marks and bandwidth policing.

* Accounting and QoS reporting to enumerate how a selected route actually performed, isolate problems and deliver real-time re-routing.

Because the product just finished beta testing, Hourihan said “we can’t name names” of potential customers, adding, “There’s a set of providers that are currently using softswitch IP networks for trunking, and they want to take their network and connect it to another provider’s network.”

That’s neither an easy nor inexpensive solution using today’s technology, especially when it comes to media gateways that over deliver transcoding capabilities that overkill in an IP-to-IP network interconnection, Hourihan said.

“Consequently, the softswitch gateway vendors that we’ve talked to don’t view us as competition,” he said. “They’re embracing us as a partner in some of the solution they’re recommending to their current customers.”