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Network Technologies Newsletter - May 2010

Welcome to another newsletter from Metaswitch's Network Protocols Division.

Today we are announcing a re-naming of the division to the Network Technologies Division. This simply reflects the fact that, while a great deal of what we do is still protocol related, our new name better captures the full range of what we do.

You'll find more details on this below, together with an update on new product features, an overview of recent announcements, plus information on conferences and webinars, and the launch of our blog.

 

Network Protocols Division becomes Network Technologies Division

Changing the name of the division is probably long overdue. We continue to be very successful in licensing portable software products to communications equipment vendors. However, some of our solutions are actually much more than stand-alone protocols. For example, our widely deployed portable Session Border Controller (DC-SBC) could be more properly regarded as network middleware that enables services and functionality straight out of the box. Similarly, our integrated IP/MPLS control plane has substantially more function than its constituent protocols, and we are continuing to extend its capabilities to allow our customers to achieve faster time-to-market. Moreover, as we look ahead, we are investing in new technologies that will certainly not be limited to protocols (stay tuned!).

The bottom line is that we feel a much more appropriate moniker is the Network Technologies Division and we look forward to continuing to deliver network related technologies to our customers and the market!

We would like to emphasize that the change of name does not change any of our fundamentals or business focus. We still operate as a separate division within the Metaswitch corporate structure, and are still 100% focused on our communications equipment vendor customers. We remain committed to investing in R&D to maintain our position as the world's preferred supplier of network technologies software. Most importantly, we remain guided by our core values of quality engineering, reliability, exceptional support and innovation.

If you have any questions please contact your local sales representative or email us at .

 

New Product Developments

The development teams have been busy with product enhancements and with keeping up with the latest industry standards. We have made several releases since the last newsletter, with highlighted features as follows.

IP Routing and MPLS

Note that some of these new IP Routing and MPLS features encompass support for MPLS-TP and OTN, which we announced on April 12. The MPLS-TP and OTN standards are still developing, and we will continue to build upon the industry's only portable MPLS-TP and OTN solution as the standards mature.

  • DC-MPLS support for Flow Aware Transport (FAT) Pseudowires (draft-ietf-pwe3-fat-pw).
  • DC-MPLS support for RFC 4328 GMPLS Signaling Extensions for G.709.
  • DC-LDP support for Pseudowire redundancy (draft-ietf-pwe3-redundancy-bit).
  • DC-BGP support for Fast External Failover.
  • DC-BGP support for AS Path Override.
  • DC-BGP support for Allow-AS In.
  • DC-BGP support for AS-Append Aggregation.

Voice-over-IP (VoIP)

  • Enhanced DC-SIP support for B2BUA handling of downstream forking.
  • Support for Delayed Replication in fault-tolerant DC-SIP installations.
  • DC-SIP support for RFC 5626 Managing Client-Initiated Connections.
  • DC-SIP support for RFC 5057 Multiple Dialog Usages.
  • Addition of RFC 3578 Overlap Dialling for DC-SIP handling of legacy calls.

Session Border Control (SBC)

  • Enhanced support for DTMF interworking, including interworking between DMTF tones carried inband and DTMF tones carried within signaling.
  • Enhancements to ENUM handling to add support for TEL:URIs, SIP:URIs and SIPS:URIs, multiple ENUM queries per call, and routing actions based on ENUM query success / failure.
  • Support for the IMS Rf reference point for billing in P-CSCF and IBCF roles as described in 3GPP TS 32.299 v8.7.0.
  • Extension of IMS Rx support for central control of call policy in non-IMS networks.
  • DC-SIG control of DC-MEDIA devices using H.248 over an IPv6 network.
  • Enhanced control of endpoint Media Policy Limit Behaviour (for example) for high-bandwidth video codecs.

Looking ahead

We continue to invest in new product features, with releases planned later in 2010. If you are interested in finding out more, or if you have an interest in influencing our roadmap, please contact your sales representative or email us at .

 

Recent Customer Announcements

We continue to expand our customer base and extend existing strategic customer relationships, where one measure of our success is that we provide technologies to all of the world's top 10 communications equipment vendors. Some notable customer announcements over the last months include the following.

What is encouraging in the customer activity over this period, as evidenced by this announced subset, is that we are seeing interest across the full spectrum of our product portfolio, for use in a very broad range of markets.

 

Conferences, White Papers and Blog

Conference exhibition and speaking engagement activity has picked up now that Spring has sprung. If you missed us at any of these events, the slides are available on our website.

Please look for us at the following upcoming events.

  • Tori Downes is presenting in a Light Reading webinar on "Session Border Controllers in the Enterprise" on September 30.
  • Joe Whitehouse is presenting at "Ethernet Expo" in New York on November 2-3.

In other news, we are starting on a refresh and overhaul of our white papers, to make sure that they remain current, and we recently updated and re-issued the ever popular "Session Border Controllers in IMS" white paper.

Lastly, we now have our very own NTD blogger, with Tori Downes joining the roster of Metaswitch bloggers at http://blogs.metaswitch.com/td. Tori will be blogging with a particular emphasis on the technologies underpinning newsworthy network applications such as IPTV, IMS, MPLS-TP and so on. Please leave a comment on her blog if there are topics you think merit blog attention.