WaveSmith partners with AP Engines

(Telephony) Network start-ups are like Rodney Dangerfield: they don’t get no respect.

"There are a lot of objections that a start-up has to overcome as a new kid on the block going into existing networks," said Charles Dunn, director of product management for soft switch start-up WaveSmith Networks. "Billing is one of them, and we're glad we knocked that one off early."

WaveSmith accomplished this by participating in AP Engines' QuickLink adapter program and gaining the billing-mediation functionality required to seamlessly integrate its multiservice switch into a carrier environment.

"We'll also do a reseller agreement, so that we can offer them product," said Dunn.

Billing is an especially thorny problem for a softswitch maker entering an RBOC's network, Dunn emphasized.

"There are so many different formats and so many different ways the OSS's are tied together,” he said. “Just by partnering with AP Engines, we can eliminate a lot of that headache for us and make our billing information talk to just about any billing system that's out there."

WaveSmith plans to introduce its first product--a multiservice switch that allows legacy networks to migrate existing ATM networks into IP/MPLS-based infrastructures--later this month and have a working demo at SuperComm. Beta trials will follow this summer, with general availability near the end of the year, Dunn said.

"This is very much a data-oriented switch," he said.

AP Engines is the first of multiple partners for the company, Dunn said.

"You'll see us do other partnerships with similar companies that can help us integrate into other portions of the network in terms of provisioning, in terms of event correlation," he said. "We're going to concentrate on building good switching hardware. We'll partner with other best-of-breed companies to get the OSS integration pieces."