Genband today unveiled the mother of all session border gateways, the 14-slot S9, which supports signaling bandwidth up to 12 Gb/s, media bandwidth up to 24 Gb/s and can maintain 150,000 concurrent sessions and 900 calls per second. Genband will sell its new creation to both wireline and wireless carriers, though at CTIA Wireless its primary focus will be at operators looking a future femtocell and future 4G deployments, where the extra capacity should come in handy.
“It’s the most highly scalable session border controller and IP routing solution in the market,” said Fred Kemmener, Genband’s chief technology officer. “Our capacity is several times higher than that of our nearest competitor.” How high? Kemmener said the platform could scale to support a network of a million of femtocells.
Like its S2 predecessor, the S9 is built on the Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA), though with seven times more capacity. The initial rollout of the product will focus primarily on its scale, but Genband plans to add features such as security support for large-scale fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) networks and deep packet inspection (DPI).
Also at CTIA, Genband is announcing mobile-centric upgrades to its workhorse G9 Converged Gateway. The G9’s job primarily is to transcode between different codecs and translate TDM to VoIP traffic. With that in mind, Genband is adding satellite communications support and, for the first time, support for CDMA, a critical feature as CDMA operators attempt to link their current networks with their future long-term evolution (LTE) cores.
