[May 08, 2012]

Taqua Announces Small Cell Core Capacity Increases With New VoWiFi and VoLTE Capabilities

Taqua, LLC, a leading supplier of convergence switching and small cell deployment solutions, today announced at International CTIA WIRELESS® 2012 that its TCS6100 Small Cell Convergence (News - Alert) core has been upgraded to enable deployment of several million subscribers while enabling a new set of Voice over WiFi (VoWiFi) and Voice over LTE (News - Alert) (VoLTE) capabilities to provide carriers with increased flexibility for their small cell deployments.

Taqua's TCS6100 Small Cell Convergence Server (TCS6100) extends macro network feature and functionality to femtocell subscribers, while providing seamless femto-to-macro handoff. Utilizing a 3GPP2-compliant SIP-based architecture, the TCS6100 delivers voice, messaging, and data convergence while providing supplementary, regulatory, and emergency services for the service provider's femtocell or other small cell subscribers.

In its latest release, Taqua's (News - Alert) TCS6100 will provide services for several million subscribers. At the same time, the system's capabilities have been expanded to provide convergence services to VoWiFi, and VoLTE subscribers via a Circuit Switch Fallback (eCSFB) implementation.

"This new small cell core release is a significant milestone for Taqua," said Scott Weidenfeller, Taqua's CMO. "Our customers are seeing strong demand for femtoclls that require high capacity nodes to accommodate increased traffic by smartphones. These new capacity updates will satisfy this growing demand, while our VoWiFi and VoLTE enhancements will provide additional deployment flexibility."

The Taqua TCS6100 delivers macro network features and service-layer interworking essential for new small cell services, while meeting strict reliability and quality standards. It integrates with incumbent Operations Support Systems (OSS) and Business Support Systems (BSS), enabling the service provider to extend existing operations practices to its femto-based or other small cell offerings. It allows the carrier to expand its mobile network capacity without re-engineering the circuit-based mobile core, while providing a graceful migration to next-generation VoIP and IMS architectures.

VoWiFi Capability

With the Taqua TCS6100's new voice and messaging over WiFi (VoWiFi) capability, carriers can now expand their small cell offering to include WiFi (News - Alert) via smartphone handsets that leverage Taqua's Small Cell Core. Within this application, the subscriber can utilize their existing wireless phone number while seamlessly preserving all of their existing calling plan features and functionality just as they do today with their cellular service.

"Historically, VoWiFi offerings have required the subscriber to utilize a secondary number and additional software launched from their handset to launch or receive a call," said Weidenfeller. "Taqua's approach is to deliver the control of these calls from the operator's small cell core with the TCS6100. The pre-loaded handset software will run in the background using VoWiFi and be completely transparent to the subscribers."

eCSFB for VoLTE

As part of the company's efforts to support the carrier's evolution to VoLTE services, the Taqua TCS6100 will provide the enhanced Circuit-Switch Fallback (eCSFB) function. As an all-IP network architecture designed for data, LTE does not inherently support legacy circuit-switch (CS) domain services. The Taqua TCS6100's eCSFB capabilities will enable circuit-switched voice and SMS services to be delivered to Long Term Evolution (LTE) devices within the requirements set forth in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 8. The Taqua TCS6100 will set up a new interface between the legacy mobile switching center (MSC (News - Alert)) and the mobile management entity (MME) in the LTE core network. When an LTE handset makes or receives voice calls, the TCS6100 will manage the "falls back" to the 3G or 2G network to complete the call.

About Taqua,^® LLC

Taqua is a leading supplier of next-generation fixed and mobile convergence switching, IP peering, backhaul systems, and enhanced applications. For more than a decade, hundreds of wireline, cable, and wireless carriers have utilized Taqua's IP-based solutions to establish converged networks and deliver enhanced services to subscribers. Taqua is headquartered in Dallas, with research and development facilities located in Boston, MA, Toronto, Canada, and Dallas, TX.

For more information, call 1.972.692.1800, email [email protected], or visit www.taqua.com.

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