4G World — LTE is providing plenty of opportunity for Bridgewater Systems, as Cellcom said this week it selected the company’s integrated control plane solution as part of its LTE rollout. Also, MetroPCS went live this week with Bridgewater’s Home Subscriber Server and Policy Control server.
Cellcom provides communications services throughout Wisconsin and Michigan and will deploy Bridgewater’s EPC 500 system to deliver IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) femtocell services and for its LTE network rollout.
The EPC 500 control plane solution provides subscriber, device, and femtocell data management, policy control, and interworking functions for the LTE Evolved Packet Core. It includes the Bridgewater Home Subscriber Server and Policy Controller (PCRF) which are anchored by Bridgewater's Subscriber Data Broker.
Cellcom will use these new systems to launch femtocell and LTE services and support subscriber and service modeling, roaming, and quality-of-service management. Cellcom is a member of the international Femto Forum and is one of four U.S. carriers who have publicly committed to femtocell deployment.
Cellcom also will offload mobile data traffic from congested 3G networks to femtocells and improve indoor coverage. Subscriber, service and policy controls will be used to manage mobile data traffic as well as subscriber, device and application growth across multiple access networks.
Robert Riordan, executive vice president at Cellcom, said his company chose the Bridgewater EPC 500 system because it is a leading edge, standards-based platform that works across multiple access networks including LTE and femtocells.
“It will immediately be part of our femtocell trial as we continue plans for a commercial launch in 2010," Riordan said.
David Sharpley, senior vice president of Bridgewater Systems, said Cellcom is demonstrating how managing subscribers, devices and applications across multiple access networks can deliver significant value to mobile subscribers.
Cellcom is a subsidiary of Nsight, a 100-year-old telecommunications company with a network customized to its rural markets and customers.
MetroPCS Communications Inc. has gone live with Bridgewater’s Home Subscriber Server (HSS) and Policy Controller (PCRF) in its LTE rollout, which will include high-speed video, multimedia and social networking. It recently launched in the Las Vegas and Dallas/Fort Worth markets.
Bridgewater’s control plane solution will manage mobile data traffic, subscribers, devices and applications and personalize services using Bridgewater’s Policy Controller, which supports 3GPP PCRF Release 7, 8 and 9 standards on the same platform, and the company’s HSS, a master repository that contains subscriber and device profile and state information, and manages subscriber identities, service profiles, authentication, authorization, and quality of service in real time.
“Our move to 4G LTE represents a first step in the transformation of our network, and ultimately a transformation of our business. 4G LTE offers us the opportunity to maintain our low-cost leadership while providing a foundation for delivering new, value-added services that our customers can enjoy today and well into the future," said Ed Chao, senior vice president of MetroPCS. “Bridgewater delivered the high performance, independent control plane functionality that we needed in our multi-vendor 4G LTE network, and, as expected, we have been extremely pleased with our HSS and PCRF project deployment."
