June 06, 2005 - Blog: Cisco is SBC Shopping
Cisco is SBC Shopping
According to various sources, Cisco is shopping for a Session Border Control (SBC) company. What are SBCs? Well, VoIP traffic has issues with network address translation (NAT), a commonly used system that not only allows companies to conserve IP addresses but it "hides" internal IP addresses from the external Internet thus providing a layer of security. Firewalls for instance usually have one external IP address (sometimes multiple) and multiple internal IP addresses and the firewall handles the traffic - directing the appropriate data to the correct IP address. The problem is that such systems generally can't figure out how to route VoIP calls.
Session Border Control (SBC) devices, built by companies, such as Acme Packet, Jasomi Networks, Kagoor Networks (now part of Juniper), Netrake, NexTone Communications and Sonus Networks, eliminate these problems. These devices manage the handoff of IP traffic between corporate customers and the service provider so that firewalls and network address translation can be used. They can also be used to handle IP traffic between different service providers.So far at least one company has been analyzed and passed over by the networking giant.
After Juniper Networks recent acquisition of Kagoor Networks, a manufacturer of SBC hardware, Cisco is looking to add more SBC companies to their arsenal. |
