Tekelec leverages portability prowess for ENUM solution

Along with its annual boost of capacity in its local number portability solution, Tekelec announced this week a private ENUM solution that operators in the U.S. will begin trialing this year.

ENUM is a protocol developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force that provides the routing information for calls and services from a single telephone number to a variety of numbers and IP addresses for multiple devices.

There are two ways ENUM can be deployed, one is known as public ENUM, which allows end users to specify which devices get mapped to a single phone number. The other, which Tier 1 operators are most interested in, is private ENUM, which is a more secure, operator-implemented solution. Tekelec’s solution addresses the private ENUM requirements of its service provider customer base.

“Private ENUM allows operators to manage their own subscriber data so they can do it in the most efficient way,” said Maria Wiatrowski, ENUM product manager for Tekelec.
Tekelec has expands the capacity of its LNP solution to support 228 million data records and will grow that to 384 million by mid-2007. The solution enables porting for GSM, CDMA and fixed networks as well as intra-carrier number retention.

“Carriers want to continue to see capacity upgrades,” said Steve French, product marketing LNP database. So local number portability continues to grow and carriers are deploying solutions to upgrade practically every year.”

Tekelec's new ENUM solution allows operators to converge multiple devices in a unified network infrastructure. Both the ENUM and LNP offerings use Tekelec's local service management solution (LSMS) to provide a single source of subscriber data.

Although the ENUM product will be deployed on a separate server as a standalone solution, it will leverage Tekelec’s LNP database design, Wiatrowski said.

The ENUM solution allows session initiation protocol (SIP) or multimedia messaging service (MMS)-based content to be sent from carrier to carrier by correlating a telephone number to a carrier domain. ENUM allows operators to reduce their routing costs in a pure IP environment by avoiding the public switched telephone network (PSTN) as well as third-party providers every time they need to route an IP-based call.

Tekelec's offering consists of a Web-based provisioning mechanism and an ENUM query/response server. The carrier ENUM database includes both ported and non-ported telephone number data provided from the Number Portability Administration Center database with Tekelec's LSMS and Local Exchange Routing Guide (LERG) data.
“If carriers already have use our LNP solution, when they think about deploying an ENUM solution they can leverage the LSMS,” French said.

Tekelec has also enhanced its EAGLE 5 ISS with origin-based MTP and SCCP routing, which gives operators greater flexibility in choosing traffic routing decisions within their networks. A new single-slot Sigtran SS7-over-IP card enables both point-to-multipoint signaling gateway applications and point-to-point IP transport applications on a single card. It also supports 4,000 message signal units per second and includes integrated data acquisition.