Service providers around the world will know that one of the most important technologies that they rely on every day is the Session Border Controllers (SBCs).
Over the years, SBCs have evolved from being a perimeter security element to becoming a central switching element at the core of many networks. This transition has resulted in different vendor products that specialise in different areas.
As SBCs are versatile network elements that play a key role in ensuring voice networks, they are able to meet the needs of businesses today and into the future, and as businesses move forward, it is important to keep an eye on the latest trends in SBC technology.
Evolution
Session Border Controllers (SBCs) are becoming ubiquitous and versatile network elements in the market, and their prominence and sophistication continue to grow. With this growth, SBCs are used to cater to future needs, and therefore the amount of uses for the technology also continues to grow.
In the market at the moment, there are vendor products that specialise in a range of areas that businesses procure and adopt at different times of their growth cycle. These products include the powering of IMS core, NGN peering, Enterprise Business SIP Trunking, UCaaS offerings, domestic interconnect, and many more.
This has meant that the average business will find that they have SBCs from two or three vendors throughout their network, serving different use cases. But this arrangement has a few shortcomings:
- Each SBC product has unique and disparate infrastructure needs that constrain efforts in Infrastructure consolidation.
- Multiple people within operations teams need to be trained and maintain multiple vendor products.
- Businesses have multiple contracts with different vendors that needs time and effort to manage
- It’s likely businesses will encounter interworking issues when introducing a new feature or a solution in the network, as different vendor products have their own peculiarities.
Cataleya Solution
This is where Cataleya’s Orchid Link SBC allows Service Providers to consolidate their SBC topology and still support multiple products and services.
