Netrake becomes Alcatel's UMA OEM

Netrake, a vendor of session border control and security gateway products, today said the company has been chosen by Alcatel to provide its nCite Security Gateway solution to support Alcatel's fixed/mobile convergence deployments based on the increasingly popular Unlicensed Mobile Access standard.

Netrake’s security gateway works with Alcatel's Mobile NGN solution based on the Alcatel 5020 Spatial Atrium multi-standard mobile call server/softswitch, said Mark Neider, vice president of product marketing at Netrake. Neider also spent some years earlier in his career at Alcatel.

The gateway is what allows secure access to GSM and GPRS mobile services over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi unlicensed spectrum technologies. "We're doing the encryption from the dual-mode handset to network core," Neider said. He added that Netrake will be part of several UMA trials and deployments Alcatel has planned for this year.

Netrake is in effect migrating its platform to become a combined session border controller/security gateway, or in the language of 3G standards, a packet data gateway. The PDG also will support session initiation protocol for a smooth evolution to IP multimedia subsystem usage, Neider said. Other vendors, such a security gateway firm Reefpoint, are in the process of making the same kind of migration. Reefpoint earlier this year announced its UMA security gateway, and more recently added IMS support.