The VoIP over WiMax push by Sonus
The timing is certainly right for Sonus to position itself in the VoIP over WiMax market, which is starting to ramp up in parts of Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. There is nothing new in terms of the capabilities that Sonus has to support for VoIP over WiMax. The existing product line will do. However there is a much wider choice or codecs that Sonus offers for VoIP over WiMax implementations. A wider choice of codecs gives a Wimax service provider flexibility in terms of the bandwidth it provisions for VoIP.
Once mobile Wimax kicks in, we can expect vendors like Sonus to tweak the platform a bit more in order to be suitable for VoIP over Mobile Wimax.
Pakistan based Wateen is the largest (and yet unannounced) customer that uses Sonus for VoIP over Wimax. According to Wateen, it has implemented Sonus gateways, call agent, policy server, and the signalling gateways. Application server comes from Sylantro while Motorola supplies the Wimax data networking equipment.
There has been some speculation around Clearwire deploying Sonus for its VoIP over Wimax offering. I was not able to confirm it. For now Clearwire uses Nortel MCS platform and gateways. Over time Clearwire would certainly have to introduce another vendor in the network. And Sonus has a good chance. I expect that to happen next year at the earliest.
Sonus will have plenty of competition for VoIP over Wimax though ….. especially since it is promoting its entire product portfolio for such deployments rather than just the media gateway platform. Several Wimax providers in Eastern Europe have already selected VoIP vendors. Huawei in particular is a very strong player in Wimax VoIP.
Huawei has Wimax VoIP customers in the Middle East, Africa, India, and the CIS countries. Warid Telecom in Uganda is one such reference customer.
