In order for a business to be profitable, it must manage all of its expenses.  These range from the smallest daily functioning costs, known as operational expenditures (OpEx), to the acquisition of new equipment essential to creating growth, which are capital expenditures (CapEx).  Service providers are CapEx and OpEx constrained; in the world of Session Border Controllers (SBCs), they must see a future benefit from their purchases in terms of security and productivity.  With these assets, the providers are limited to the capacities of the SBCs, as determined on their specifications.  The challenge for service providers is the need to translate the largest amount of units in the smallest footprint for rack space, in real-world conditions.  What we find with our competitors in the world of SBCs is they often do not give clear, truthful analysis of what platforms are able to do; they give marketing numbers.  Service providers make precise computations to budget all of their costs; they need to determine how low their operational expenses can be reduced without negatively impacting the firm’s competitiveness.  If they base their computations on inaccurate specifications, then expenditures based on those numbers will lead to decreased productivity.

Sonus SBCs, for example, can be relied upon to handle many endpoints at a high call volume with dense interworking of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) without fail because of the underlying hardware and software architecture. Why is this going to be important for service providers? Because Sonus lives up to customers’ expectations so that service providers can properly traffic engineer their offerings based on Sonus’ specifications, and they can feel comfortable that we are not going to fail them.  Service providers can do this based on complex flows that they are going to see in real-life circumstances, and they can do it without worrying about the box being at the endpoint of its capabilities.

To prove the accuracy in our specifications, Sonus asked Miercom put the SBC 7000 Session Border Controller through rigorous performance testing. That is how confident we are in the performance capabilities of the SBC 7000. We stated that the SBC 7000 is capable of 1,350 calls per second (cps), using full 24-message SIP calls with SIP Message Manipulation (SMM) applied.  (We will look into the 24-message SIP format in a later blog in a later blog.)  Miercom’s results showed that the SBC 7000 can indeed process 1,350 cps without any failed or dropped calls, as well as ample CPU and memory left over. Thus, Sonus customers have confidence that Sonus’ SBC 7000 will provide the performance aligned with their cost budgeting and service offerings.

But, don’t just take my word for it – take Miercom’s. The SBC 7000 received Miercom Performance Verified certification, demonstrating exceptional performance, scalability, resiliency and efficacy during Miercom thorough testing validation. The Sonus SBC 7000 proved best overall in voice quality with heavy concurrent call load, with Denial of Service (DoS) attacks applied, and also demonstrated exceptional reliability under full system node failover tests without dropping a single call. The full Miercom can also be downloaded here.

Sonus SBCs consistently meet our published specifications, period, so you will not have to worry about lost opportunity.  Are you confident that your SBC provides the best performance under its given specifications?  Let me know.