Nokia Siemens Networks has said that it now has 200 softswitch clients. Nokia Networks, when it was just plain old Nokia, passed the 100 mark just over two years ago.
The vendor says a number of recent deals – most notably with two large operators in North America – haveput it past the 200-customer milestone, an average of nearly one new customer a week since the solution was introduced in January 2004.
After striking the deal to deploy its next generation wireless network for the North American operators, Nokia Siemens Networks has won even more customers for its mobile softswitching solution, with the total now standing at 207 mobile operators — over 140 of which are already using the solution to carry live traffic.
“We are extremely pleased that our recent landmark agreements in North America also mark our 200th mobile softswitching deployment,” says Jürgen Walter, head of Converged Core, Nokia Siemens Networks. “This innovative solution has long been a point of pride for us, underscoring our ‘first mover’ mindset in designing a technology that is absolutely key to the continued success of mobile operators. Gaining 200 customers, and beyond, is a strong endorsement of the benefits of our solution, and makes us even prouder.”
Mobile softswitching rationalizes the design of traditional circuit-switched core networks, allowing operators to realize significant savings in operating expenditures of up to 70% in transmission, site, and operation and management costs. The solution also brings increased savings in power consumption, addressing a major pain point for large mobile operators.
These savings are made possible by the “split” architecture of softswitching, which separate the essential functions of the core network into two hardware elements: the MSC Server (MSS), for call control, and the Media Gateway (MGW), for voice processing and switching. To date, Nokia Siemens Networks has deployed over 1300 individual MSC Severs and over 2700 Media Gateways for its 207 customers to serve over 800 million GSM/WCDMA subscribers. Shipments during first 9 months this year have already exceeded the shipments for the entirety of 2007.
By separating the MGW from the centralized call control, operators can locate MGWs near traffic hot spots to handle local traffic locally, thus by passing the need to route all traffic through a central site. This translates into reduced costs for transmission and site maintenance.
The use of IP also provides an evolution path to IP multimedia thanks to interworking with IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS).