Tekelec Launches Over-the-Top Solution for New Diameter Network

Enables “Toll-free” Mobile Data Services and New Over-the-top Business Models

BARCELONA, Spain — LTE World Summit — May 22, 2012 — Mobile operators have a new, secure and efficient way to connect over-the-top (OTT) applications to their networks for new revenue-sharing business models. Tekelec has expanded the functionality of its #1 market-leading Diameter Signaling Router (DSR) to act as the secure interconnection point for OTT applications such as social networking, video streaming and multimedia communications running over operators’ mobile networks.

This new functionality, called the DSR Over-the-Top Proxy, enables several innovative business models including:

• “Toll-free” data, where third parties subsidize subscribers’ application usage. This establishes a direct billing relationship between operators and OTT application providers, and gives subscribers data usage that does not count against their monthly allowances.

• Quality-of-service based tiers. Similar to “toll-free” data, this type of plan subsidizes data usage for a guaranteed level of quality. For example, an operator could have video count against a subscriber’s quota for standard quality, and have the application provider pay for the bandwidth during a high definition video session that requires greater speeds.

• Promotional offers. This type of model would allow, for example, a monthly streaming music service to offer 10 hours free to a subscriber, with the music service paying the operator for the bandwidth consumed. Another variation would be a video service paying for the data generated from a movie preview, and the subscriber responsible for data consumed by the full movie.

• Loyalty programs. Third parties could reward subscribers with “toll-free” data for anniversaries, birthdays, holidays or a few hours.

“The current business model of operators shouldering all over-the-top traffic costs while receiving limited revenue is unsustainable,” said Houck Reed, Tekelec’s vice president of product management. “Service providers now have a key way to enable toll-free data by offering a secure connection to over-the-top application providers.”

Each revenue-sharing model requires a service provider to expose policies that define service rules and subscriber data that personalize services to an application provider. The messages carrying usage data communicate using the industry-standard Diameter protocol.

Tekelec’s DSR OTT Proxy adds network intelligence and security functions to the delivery and receipt of Diameter messages. It provides a central point to manage traffic handoffs between operators and applications and acts as a secure firewall for all Diameter traffic coming into operators’ networks. This allows operators to hide the IP addresses of their equipment and prevent an application from flooding the network with a signaling storm of Diameter messages.

This new functionality extends the Diameter Signaling Router’s role in helping operators generate revenues from mobile data as described in the new white paper: “New Diameter Network: Over-the-Top, Clouds and Machines.”

Tekelec has already sold the DSR to provide core routing functions and proxy capabilities for charging systems, policy servers, home subscriber servers (HSSs) and roaming to and from partner networks.

Tekelec also announced today that it has a total of 19 DSR customers across 10 countries. Earlier this year, Infonetics Research named Tekelec the “front runner” in the emerging Diameter signaling market.

Supporting Resources

New Diameter Network: Over-the-Top, Clouds and Machines White Paper

The New Diameter Network White Paper

The Time for Diameter Is Now White Paper

Diameter Signaling Router product brief

About Tekelec

Tekelec’s intelligent mobile broadband solutions enable service providers to manage and monetize mobile data and evolve to LTE and IMS. We are the architects of the new Diameter network, the foundation for session, policy and subscriber data management. More than 300 service providers use our market-leading solutions to deliver cloud, machine-to-machine and personalized services to consumers and enterprises. For more information visit www.tekelec.com.