Sprint has selected Bridgewater Systems as the network access control vendor for its forthcoming nationwide XOHM WiMAX Network. Bridgewater is the incumbent supplier of Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) services to Sprint’s existing CDMA 3G network and will now extend its solution to support XOHM as well. Within Sprint, Bridgewater will provide concurrent support for 3G and 4G networks from a common infrastructure as Sprint begins to commercially deploy the XOHM WiMAX network in 2008. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The Bridgewater Systems AAA Service Controller provides extensive mobile WiMAX support often not supported on legacy AAA servers such as device authentication and mobile IP. The AAA Service Controller also features concurrent support for RADIUS and Diameter, as well as broad supplemental authentication protocols such as EAP-TLS and EAP-TTLS. With a common policy and subscriber profile repository that serves all access networks, service providers can create a unified view of subscribers, and realize operational efficiencies by eliminating the need to re-provision subscribers as new access technologies such as WiMAX are introduced.
Bridgewater’s platform provides high performance network access control while supporting open network access services, such as over the air provisioning of devices, subscribers and on-demand service models, and lawful intercept services. By being agnostic to various access technologies as well as vendor-specific solutions, the Bridgewater solution is able to support a wide array of access networks and interoperate with multiple network vendor equipment types from a single platform.
Bridgewater noted that it has now been selected by nine WiMAX service providers to provide a range of service control solutions.http://www.bridgewatersystems.com
