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With the telecom landscape becoming increasingly competitive, service providers are always keen on diversifying and expanding their service offerings. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technology can empower service providers to design and launch new services and manage them cost-effectively. Dialogic (News - Alert), a company specializing in network technologies, has said that the latest generation of its BorderNet session border controller, coming with native software transcoding, can go a long way toward helping service providers implement such an NFV strategy.

Networks’ rapid shift to an all-IP infrastructure has spurred the demand for Session Border Controllers (SBCs). The original purpose of the SBC was to serve as a signal mediator to separate the sessions between two service provider networks in a peering environment, all the while ensuring connectivity between the networks. However, the company’s new session border controllers are designed to incorporate more advanced media processing functions, including software transcoding.

The BorderNet Virtualized Session Border Controller (SBC) is a software-based SBC designed to help service providers overcome important multimedia service deployment tasks and accelerate their path to NFV and the cloud. In its latest version, BorderNet 3.2 not only integrates BorderNet Virtualized SBC and the BorderNet 4000 SBC, but also features the described multimedia processing and software transcoding capabilities. This makes it, according to its maker, the industry’s first carrier class software session border controller with native transcoding that can operate in a virtualized environment on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) servers.

One of its many advantages includes the bridging of HD voice services between wireline and wireless implementations. The software encoding also provides carriers with the ability to bridge services between HD voice and narrowband voice networks. Furthermore, it also enables any-to-any networking for voice and video applications.

Service providers seeking to utilize virtualized infrastructure will find this enhancement exciting, as it aims to help them maximize ROI from their data center investments.

“Service providers are catching on to the investment return from driving functionality to data centers and virtualized environments instead of to proprietary purpose-built platforms. It’s in their interest to tap into the scalability, flexibility and cost savings that come with NFV, and Dialogic's native software transcoding capabilities are a critical part of that pursuit. By integrating the unparalleled media processing capabilities of our PowerMedia technology, we can seamlessly add to the BorderNet 4000 and Virtualized SBCs other capabilities - like video and WebRTC codec support and interworking - more easily and quickly,” said Jim Machi, vice president of product management for Dialogic, in a statemet.

It will be worthwhile to mention here that in addition to software transcoding, Release 3.2 packs many more new features, including scalable support for SIP, SIP-I and SIP-T interworking across mobile and fixed networks; IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) Proxy Call Server Control Function (P-CSCF) capabilities; and enhanced complex call handling to support advanced UC and contact center call scenarios.