Session Border Controllers for Service Providers

Cloud-Native, Virtual, or Appliances: Pick the Right SBC for Your Network and Services

Lottie file

What makes Ribbon SBCs stand apart from the competition? Maybe it’s the fact that the world’s most demanding service providers have trusted Ribbon to deliver secure, high-quality SIP communications for more than 20 years. Perhaps it’s the peace of mind that comes from independent testing that shows that Ribbon SBCs can thwart the most challenging denial of service attacks without impacting call traffic. Or, maybe it’s because we offer more deployment choices with SBC models that range from those that are perfect for small service providers all the way up to those with the best scale, performance, and security for Tier 1 service providers. It could also be the knowledge that Ribbon’s portfolio of cloud-native, virtual, and appliance-based SBCs all share common applications software. Ultimately, it likely just comes down to something simple - Ribbon SBCs work.

Ribbon SBCs are an integral piece of Ribbon’s Telco Cloud portfolio working in concert with Ribbon’s Policy and Routing Server (PSX), Ribbon Analytics, and  Ribbon Call Trust(R) & Ribbon Connect as a Service offers.   Together these integrated solutions are more than the sum of the individual pieces.  

Ribbon SBCs are often deployed along with Ribbon’s PSX to enable highly efficient, centralized, and scalable network policy and routing control. Service providers can configure and institute a policy change in the PSX Primary and see it start to cascade across a worldwide network of PSX Replicas in minutes. This deployment model dramatically reduces operational costs compared to traditional solutions, enables one-touch network-wide policy management, and ensures operational decisions are consistent across a service provider's network. It’s no wonder leading service providers around the globe rely on Ribbon SBC and PSX solutions.

Interworking between Ribbon SBCs, Ribbon Analytics, and Ribbon Call Trust services makes it possible for a service provider to more rapidly respond to real-time communications cyberattacks, fraud attempts, and network quality incidents than can be done with our competitors using standalone solutions.

Ribbon's SBCs are certified with Microsoft Teams Direct Routing, Microsoft Operator Connect, Zoom Phone BYOC, Ring Central, Webex Local Gateway solutions, Google Voice SIP Link, AWS Chime, as well as many other cloud-based unified communications platforms. They are also tested with popular cloud-based contact centers from Genesys, Five9, Nice InContact, and more. Ribbon also has the benefit of hundreds of thousands of existing deployments worldwide, meaning our solutions are deployed with Avaya, Asterisk, Mitel, Cisco, Avaya, and countless other brands of PBXs and contact centers. 

 

Session Border Controllers for Dummies

Discover why you need a session border controller in your network.

Service Provider Core Network

Ribbon's family of next-generation session border controllers (SBCs) provides robust security, simplified interoperability, advanced session management, and carrier-grade reliability for fixed, mobile, cable, and wholesale service providers. Ribbon's SBCs offer powerful deployment flexibility that meets or exceeds the demanding levels of security and service quality for applications such as SIP trunking (including Microsoft Teams Direct Routing), Unified Communications, Network-Network Interconnection, VoLTE, VoWiFi, and RCS. Ribbon SBCs deliver network security, routing and policy management, overload controls, SIP normalization along with IPv4-IPv6 interworking, and robust media transcoding. They also deliver support for STIR/SHAKEN (Secure Telephone Identity Revisited / Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs) standards for caller identity authentication and verification.

SBC Cloud Native Edition

Ribbon’s Session Border Controller Cloud Native Edition (SBC CNe) delivers best-in-class real-time communications security. Designed using cloud-native architecture and operational principles, SBC CNe reduces the cost and complexity of securely connecting a very wide range of VoIP services. SBC CNe delivers:

  • VoIP Security (topology hiding, encryption, protection against Denial-of-Service attacks, and much more)
  • Proven interoperability with leading cloud UC and cloud contact center services, IP-PBXs, SIP endpoints, and SIP trunking providers
  • Certified for Microsoft Teams Direct Routing and Zoom Phone BYOC
  • Powerful media services including extensive media transcoding

SBC CNe has been designed based on a microservices architecture deployed in containers using Kubernetes for lifecycle management. This architecture dynamically scales up to meet increasing demand and scales down when traffic is light, reducing cloud compute costs.  The cloud-native design inherently provides a high degree of resiliency by loosely coupling services such that a software operation can fail without impacting other active services.  Furthermore, SBC CNe is designed to seamlessly integrate into a customer’s observability framework with APIs for many open-source applications.

SBC CNe is managed by Ribbon Application Management Platform, a common solution used across the Ribbon portfolio making it an integrated part of a multi-product, multi-site Ribbon deployment.  A customer deploying SBC CNe will leverage Ribbon Automation to simplify and automate cloud-native operational processes for software delivery, testing, lifecycle management, and provisioning

SBC CNe

AvidThink Telco Cloud and Edge Report 2023

Next-generation foundations for communications workloads

Virtualized Software SBC

Deploying IP-based unified communications, conferencing, collaboration, or contact center applications on private or public (AWS, Azure, GCP) clouds is becoming commonplace. And each of these applications needs the security and interoperability that SBCs deliver.

So you will need a virtualized SBC that was designed to be deployed in multiple private or public cloud environments and to meet the scalability, reliability, and functionality to provide carrier-grade services.

Ribbon's virtual SBC Software Edition (SBC SWe) has been designed to meet the unique requirements for reliability and scalability of real-time communications in a VM/KVM, or OpenStack/Virtual Networks Function (VNF) private cloud deployment. The SBC SWe aligns with both ETSI and ONAP orchestration models when running in a VNF deployment.

Similarly, the SBC SWe is deployable in public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP) providing the same degree of scalability and reliability.as in private clouds.

Capitalizing on Ribbon's legacy of innovation and feature richness, the SBC SWe shares its software code base with the SBC 5400 and SBC 7000 , making it one of the most trusted security solutions on the planet.

Virtual Core SBC
sbc-public-cloud

Turnkey Hardware Platforms

Ribbon's SBC hardware platforms provide robust security, simplified interoperability, advanced session management, and carrier-grade reliability for fixed, mobile, cable, and wholesale service providers. Our SBCs are designed to support a wide range of services including high definition (HD) voice and video, Voice over Long-Term Evolution (VoLTE), and Rich Communications Services (RCS), without sacrificing performance or security.

Ribbon’s SBC 5400 and SBC 7000 deliver market-leading performance and scale, enough even for the largest Tier 1 service providers.  In fact, the SBC 7000 touts the industry’s highest scale – up to 150,000 sessions with fully enabled security, media, and transcoding features. It supports nearly 10 times more Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol (SRTP) sessions than any other SBC on the market, giving service providers maximum message authentication and replay protection for VoIP traffic.

Using Ribbon-designed media transcoding firmware, these SBCs provide industry-leading transcoding capacity, with the SBC 7000 delivering nearly two times more transcoding than competitive platforms, making it the best option for service providers who have high-volume interconnection traffic.

And this performance does not waiver even when under security attacks or with all features enabled.

The SBC 5400 delivers all the same features and functionality as the SBC 7000, just doing so in a smaller form factor. As a proven solution, the SBC 5400 offers predictable and assured performance with scalability up to 75,000 anchored media sessions using a choice of 2x1GB, 4x1GB, or 2x10GB IP Interfaces. With a seamless, software license assignment you can upgrade from 2GB to 10GB of multimedia traffic.

Ribbon’s SBC 5400 and SBC 7000 share a common code base making them easy for organizations to operationalize because all features perform the same, regardless of platform.  In addition, they are supported by a common management solution, making them easy to deploy and maintain. 

STIR/SHAKEN and Identity Assurance

Ribbon’s Core SBC portfolio ( SBC SWe, SBC 5400, and SBC 7000) plays an important role as an enabler for our customer’s implementation of STIR/SHAKEN. SBCs interwork with call controllers and the Ribbon PSX to support caller identity authentication or verification requests.

SBCs will update the Identity Header information in the SIP INVITE message for caller ID authentication or verification in compliance with STIR/SHAKEN standards.

In addition, SBC call detail records (CDRs) can be fed into Ribbon Analytics to assist in determining potential robocall or fraud call attempts. 

Service Provider Intelligent Edge

The dramatic rise in hosted and cloud-based services creates opportunities for service providers to deliver high-value services. However, it also creates new challenges in terms of deployment and management. As businesses move their communication services to the cloud, they expect service providers to proactively manage and secure those services.

Ribbon’s Intelligent Edge™ portfolio is designed to meet the demanding needs of service providers looking to deploy Unified Communications and SIP Trunking, including Microsoft Teams Direct Routing, with a high degree of security and quality.

Ribbon provides both hardware and software-based solutions. Ribbon hardware (SBC 1000, SBC 2000, and EdgeMarc devices) act as full-fledged service demarcation devices for enterprise edge networks and provide analog or digital ports to simplify the migration of legacy PBXs, call centers, and analog devices. Ribbon offers software only solutions that can be deployed on virtualized hardware or on a public cloud (in Azure and AWS) to support IP-only deployments. The Ribbon Application Management Platform (RAMP) provides centralized management and zero-touch provisioning.

It’s no wonder that Tier 1 service Providers have over ¼ million EdgeMarcs deployed.

Microsoft Teams Direct Routing

Teams is the fastest growing business application in the Microsoft’s history. Many organizations are already using Teams for video conferencing, collaboration, file sharing and chat. Microsoft Phone System Direct Routing allows organizations to connect to external phone lines and use Teams as an office phone system. Direct Routing requires a Microsoft certified Session Border Controller (SBC) to connect Teams to a communications service provider.

Along with Direct Routing, Microsoft Operator Connect is a next generation cloud-to-cloud interconnect solution that tightens the integration between service providers and Microsoft Teams to simplify the Teams customer experience,
Ribbon’s extensive portfolio of Microsoft-certified SBCs, coupled with decades of experience building session border controllers for SIP trunking, make Ribbon the right solution for service providers to deliver market-leading Direct Routing services to new and existing business customers.

Organizations can select from hundreds of service providers across the globe. Each service provider has multiple choices to provide the required SBC, including both software and hardware options in the Ribbon Intelligent Edge portfolio that can be on the customer’s premises or in private or public cloud.

microsoft-teams-direct-routing-edge-diagram

Microsoft Operator Connect

Microsoft Operator Connect is a next generation cloud-to-cloud interconnect solution that tightens the integration between service providers and Microsoft Teams. Designed to simplify the Teams customer experience, service providers can combine their SIP Trunking services with Microsoft 365 workflow APIs to make it easy for an enterprise to acquire and deploy PSTN calling services for Teams. Enterprises can configure users for Teams calling and at the same time buy and assign DIDs/DDIs from their preferred service provider.
Ribbon SBCs are fully compatible with Operator Connect and Ribbon is working with Microsoft and many service providers who are rolling out this new service.

  • Service providers connecting to the Microsoft 365 cloud use their peering SBCs to secure and ensure interoperability for SIP trunking. Ribbon’s core SBCs deliver multi-tenancy, scalability and high-availability that is required to provide cost-effective connectivity between a service provider’s network and Microsoft Azure

  • Operator Connect provides integration tools (APIs) to automate the interaction between a service provider and Microsoft, enabling carriers to sell and deploy SIP trunks (DIDs/DDIs) from inside of the Microsoft 365 portal

 

microsoft-operator-connect-diagram

Microsoft Certified Core SBCs

SBC Products Maximum Sessions Fit Deployment
Environment
SBC 7000 150,000 CSP or Enterprise Turnkey Hardware
SBC 5400 75,000 CSP or Enterprise Turnkey Hardware
SBC SWe 75,000 CSP or Enterprise Virtual - Private/Public Cloud
SBC CNe Edge 10,000 CSP or Enterprise Cloud Native - Private/Public Cloud
SBC SWe Edge 1000 Enterprise or Small Business Virtual - Private/Public Cloud
SBC 2000 600 Enterprise or Small Business Turnkey Hardware
EdgeMarc Portfolio 300-2,000 Enterprise or Small Business Turnkey Hardware
SBC 1000 192 Enterprise or Small Business Turnkey Hardware

Managing Service Provider SBCs

PSX SWE - MANAGEMENT SOLUTION RAMP

Ribbon’s portfolio of service provider core and edge SBCs are managed from a centralized Ribbon Application Management Platform that offers a complete Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, and Security solution. Delivering intuitive, reliable, scalable, and automated management, a service provider can quickly configure systems, identify and remediate issues, deliver improved customer experience, and do so at reduced operational costs.

Ribbon Application Management Platform manages service provider SBCs deployed across physical, virtual, and cloud-native environments. The platform itself is designed using cloud-native principles and can be deployed in multiple data center and public or private cloud environments, in standalone or high-availability configurations, including options for geographic redundancy.

Download our RAMP Datasheet

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