Samsung to sell Sonus IP switching gear

Samsung will incorporate Sonus’ packet switch architecture into its wireless infrastructure portfolio, Sonus officials said today. The deal makes Samsung the second vendor to select the traditionally wireline softswitch provider for wireless deployments.

Samsung will sell Sonus’s GSX9000 Open Services Switch as a wireless trunking solution to its carrier customers, helping them incorporate VoIP as a transport technology in their networks. While Samsung and Sonus’s other wireless partner, Motorola, will primarily use Sonus gear to link MSCs, Sonus officials said they expect those initial deployments will act as starting points to drive VoIP further into the core and eventually into access portions of the network. Sonus is also migrating its softswitch platform to IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) and eventually hopes to use its technology as the key integration point between wireline and wireless networks.

"If you look at what’s happening in the industry, it’s convergence," said Steve Edwards, chief marketing officer for Sonus. "If you look at the guys who can really benefit from IP networks, it’s the wireless carriers."

Sonus’s relationship with Motorola has already landed its switches in Cingular’s transport network. Though Sonus said it couldn’t reveal whether it has discussed any possible migration to IMS or core implementations of its equipment, Sonus vice president of business development Anand Parikh said the migration would not be a difficult one. The same media gateways would be used in wireline networks that would work in a wireless deployment and the softswitch architecture is essentially the same.

"If you look at the architecture of the Sonus solution, it fits in very nicely with IMS," he said. "They use many of the same building blocks."