Acme Packet loads up with interworking, femtocell news

Working to beat the rush of CTIA and VoiceCon news next week, Acme Packet announced new interworking functions for its Net-Net SBC family and the creation of a femtocell ecosystem with other hardware vendors. However, news about the new enterprise-sized SBC box will have to wait until next week.  

Acme's new interworking functions include IPv6 to IPv4 and a trio of SIP to PSTN interworking functions. Interworking for IPv6 and IPv4 networks is a topic that is picking up. The IANA projects that the global IPv4 address pool will be exhausted by 2011 with all those new mobile broadband devices sucking up IP addresses, along with machine-to-machine (M2M) communication (think IBM Smart Grid commercials) and continued Internet growth in Asia. IPv6 and IPv4 networks will need to coexist for an "extended" period of time, says Acme, so SBCs are necessary to get SIP traffic between the two universes.

Interconnecting SIP networks to the PSTN has long been a challenge thanks to the use and adoption of different SIP standards. SIP-T was defined by the IETF and first to be used and standardized while SIP-I was defined by the ITU and incorporated into NGN/IMS architectures. There's also the not-so-little matter over multiple flavors of SIP message format variations across standard groups, countries, and vendor-specific implementations for SS7. Acme Packet's new interworking functions solve that.

On the femtocell front, Acme announced it is working with AirWalk Communications, Tatara Systems and Ubiquisys. Acme has demonstrated proven interoperability with its multi-service security gateway and SBC with the three femtocell vendors, so vendors can pick up a working solution without having to lose sleep about interoperability.

For more:
- Acme's interworking [1] and femtocell [2] announcements.

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