Stratus Telecommunications has prepared a white paper titled “Leverage Session Control for Sustainable Competitive Advantage,” detailing how to use session border controllers for a competitive advantage.

“IP provides the ideal foundation for the flexible, feature-rich converged services of the future, yet current IP networks were designed for less ambitious service offerings,” Stratus officials say. “As a result, the network is undergoing a transformation to create the functionality needed to control, manage and provision real-time multimedia services and subscribers.”

As a result, they conclude, IP multimedia sub-systems are emerging as the standard of choice that will help re-cast network services as network experiences.

Originally created to facilitate interconnection of disparate IP networks, session border controllers have emerged as a focal point in today’s IP networks, and promise to assume an even more important role in the IMS-based networks of the future, the paper found:

“Worldwide SBC revenues, which topped $120 million in 2006, are projected to rise quickly through 2010. Frost & Sullivan predicts SBC revenues to nearly double ($220 million) by 2009, while Infonetics Research (News - Alert) projects a compound annual growth rate of 44 percent with revenues reaching $541 million by 2010.”

According to the white paper, analysts agree that “SBC revenue growth is being fueled by the move towards ubiquitous converged IP communications over multiple heterogeneous broadband access networks.”

Traditional SBCs facilitate secure, reliable service connections between adjacent VoIP networks, the paper notes, “so that seamless end-to-end transmission of voice calls over multiple network segments is possible. By enabling interoperability between disparate network neighbors, SBCs streamline the flow of media across network boundaries.”

At the same time, SBCs police the traffic attempting to move across network boundaries, admitting only authorized traffic, preventing network overload and ensuring Quality of Service. Thus, SBCs enable service providers to offer exciting new services to their customers while protecting the integrity of their networks, so that SPs can deliver — and charge for — high-quality voice over IP services.