3G Wireless Technology Pushes Product Launches

Canada : Bridgewater Systems has introduced two product changes to mark its move into the emerging 3G wireless space.

Inset is Bridgewater Systems CTO Russ Freen who is quoted.

It will begin trialing a Home Subscriber Server (HSS) that provides the subscriber’s master database with all subscription-related information and migrate its wireline-based dynamic broadband manager from wireline to wireless capabilities.

Bridgewater might be creating an interesting market niche with the HSS while it might be ahead of the curve with the dynamic broadband manager, said Peter Jarich, principal analyst-wireless infrastructure, for Current Analysis.

“The HSS is just a migration from an HLR (Home Location Register) which is a subscriber data base on a mobile network,” said Jarich. “Anyone who has an IMS system pretty much has one of those.”

Anyone who doesn’t have an IMS system, however, is potential customer for a new third party vendor like Bridgewater.

“It will be interesting to see their opportunities with a vendor like Cisco that doesn’t have a mobile history, doesn’t have an HLR. Is there a good opportunity for Bridgewater in a place like that? Do they leverage that? Can they leverage that? We’ll find out,” he said.

Bridgewater is expanding its currently deployed technology, including AAA servers, functionality for application integration through an application authorization server and session state information and implementing it with standard interfaces defined by IMS architectures in 3GPP and 3GPP-2, said Jim Ghaddane, Bridgewater’s marketing vice president.

Migrating the dynamic broadband manager into 3G is a solution for a problem that’s not yet happened, but will, said Ghaddane.

“The initial application is just ways for the operators to detect who’s downloading and who’s using more share of the bandwidth than anyone else,” said Ghaddane. “We see that as first looking at understanding bandwidth usage and then subsequently putting either some control or charging for higher level service where warranted.”

That thinking is a little more over-the-edge than the HSS development, said Jarich.

“When data usage is still pretty low, is that a major worry that people are beginning to run into each other?” Jarich asked. “I think it’s more of an issue of something you want to be prepared for down the road.”

Jarich said that it might be more interesting if Bridgewater turned it into a “general policy tool. Then they can start adding in other policy information.”

Ghaddane expects that to happen if 3G wireless Internet access mirrors wireline access where the need to monitor and control the types of applications being accessed became important for service providers.

“There’s an emerging need to be able to ensure that there’s a safe use of these things like blocking access to content,” said Ghaddane, pointing to the probable requirement that service providers block children from access adult content. “We’ve started to talk to some of the operators about trying to deploy some technology to really try to pre-empt a ruling from the FCC that might be stricter than what they want to do. We’re talking to them about the ability to look at controls for their content.”