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Adax Rolls Out Intelligent ATM Controller for 3G

Adax, the industry leader in high performance wide area communications and signaling infrastructure, has introduced a new range of ATM controllers with improved functionality, including Ethernet capabilities. The new Adax ATM Plus controllers will allow customers to build 3G networks capable of utilising broadband ATM-OC3/STM-1/STS-3c, essential for processing high volume traffic on the new multi-media mobile networks.

The Adax ATM–OC3 solution serves as the Gateway interface to wireless networks and VPNs over AAL5 and IP. Both optical and copper interfaces are available and two 10/100 BaseT Ethernet ports provide LAN access to the Internet and VPNs.

The Adax ATM Plus now includes a new routing controller which supports 64 Virtual Circuits (VCs) for signaling and 64,000 VCs for content traffic. The card also supports cell switching and VPI/VCI trunk mapping which can eliminate the need for an external switch to separate signaling from content traffic. This provides significant cost savings and reduces equipment footprint, says Adax.

“The introduction of Ethernet capabilities together with our SCTP/T software will enable convergence between 3G, PSTN, and IP networks,” commented Robin Kent, Director of European operations at Adax. “We are pleased to introduce a powerful solution to allow equipment manufacturers and operators to deliver convergence at the most fundamental network layer.”

The ATM Plus supports a variety of Adax protocol products including ATM AAL5, IP over ATM AAL5, SSCOP/SSCF over AAL5 (Q.2931), SCTP over IP over AAL5, Frame Relay over AAL5, SCTP over Ethernet and IP over Ethernet.

Combined with a high speed on-board RISC processor and increased RAM, the ATM Plus enables reliable, high-performance, handling of demanding mixed media telecommunications applications without depleting the resources of the host CPU. In a test configuration with a 500 MHz single board computer, the ATM Plus processed 2500, 256 byte frames per second with CPU utilisation less than 40%. This offers a performance enhancement of up to 50% compared with similar products. The Adax range brings telco grade products to IP and PSTN based networks that have the built-in capacity to deliver a level of signaling robustness and efficiency comparable to that usually only found in traditional ATM and SS7 signaling networks.

The new Adax ATM Plus controllers, available as PCI and CompactPCI cards, complement the established Adax Protocol Controller and Adax Protocol Software product lines. Together, they enable Integrators and OEMs to build high performance, totally scalable systems with any mix of ATM, SCTP, Frame Relay, X.25 and SS7 for delivering multimedia content via IP-PSTN networks for 3G in general, and UMTS in particular.