Kodiak links with Lucent for faster call set-up

ATLANTA--

Kodiak Networks announced at CTIA that it has signed an agreement with Lucent Technologies to offer wireless carriers a push-to-speak solution combining Kodiak’s RTX System with Lucent's CDMA2000 infrastructure.

The agreement marks the first time Kodiak has integrated its platform with a CDMA vendor. Previously the company had announced Alltel, which uses CDMA, as a customer, but it hadn’t linked itself to a specific vendor.

The RTX system is centered around a switch designed to interoperate with existing wireless infrastructure. The product itself is a switch that uses SS7 to set up push-to-speak sessions based on a predetermined dialing prefix. The company is promising in its initial deployments to complete call set-up in less than three seconds in part because its approach is based on the switch.

“Switches have no latency,” said Kodiak Networks CEO Craig Farrill, who co-founded the company a couple of years after serving for almost a decade as CTO of Vodafone AirTouch.

According to one source, Cingular is among the carriers currently considering deploying Kodiak’s technology.