Start-up targets SMS for FMC

In an era of consolidation, start-ups have become rare but Stoke, a venture capital-funded newcomer, is nonetheless going bravely where it thinks no one has gone before, into subscriber management for converged access.

The company this week is announcing both its third funding round — an oversubscribed $20 million round led by DAG Ventures and including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital — and its new product, the Stoke Session Exchange (SSX) 3000, a multi-access gateway.

The SSX 3000 is designed to serve network operators in the era of multiple access technologies, including different types of wireless such as cellular, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, as well as fixed fiber, copper and cable, said Keith Higgins, Stoke's vice president of marketing. It provides stateful session management for broadband multimedia services based on service provider and customer priorities, such as availability, price and location, and also provides security and quality control.

The system will replace gateways now used for subscriber management for discrete services, Higgins said, though more than likely, it will be deployed initially to support WiMAX and fixed/mobile convergence (FMC).

“Existing gateways [for wireless networks] provide the data connectivity for existing mobile phones, but they were designed for lots of low-bandwidth sessions, with no encryption, no multimedia and no mobility between networks,” he said. “Now, as you want to move between a cellular and a Wi-Fi network or a WiMAX to Wi-Fi network, we can manage that session.”

Current Analysis analyst Joe McGarvey sees the SSX as a new form of “god box,” in that it combines multiple functions into a single, more efficient system.

“I mean that in a good way,” he said. “Convergence has been going on in the core of the network, but we've had all these different access technologies. This brings convergence to the access.”

It also brings together functionality now resident in multiple different systems, including broadband remote access servers, edge routers, subscriber management systems (SMS) and even the security functions of session border controllers, McGarvey said. “I think there is some real validity to this kind of network access device.”

The system is scalable — it can be cost-effectively deployed for a customer base as low as 4000 and scale up to support 256,000 active sessions, Higgins said. Stoke doesn't expect to see service providers rip out existing SMS gateways to install its system but does hope to gain the growth business of WiMAX deployment and see traffic migrate to its system as FMC takes hold.