nTels awarded “Best New Product” in Billing & OSS World 2005 Excellence Award.
nTels, the leading convergent communication platform provider in Korea, has been announced as the winner of the “Best New Product” category in the Billing and OSS World 2005 Excellence Award. This award recognizes nTels for its successful system implementation, proven, reliable solution offerings, and achievement in total customer satisfaction. The “Best New Product” award is also intended to acknowledge products that evolve through significant and major upgrades towards quality, next generation, and forward thinking.
No stranger to the Excellence Award event, nTels has been nominated as the finalist in various categories for four consecutive years. This year was no different; nTels was nominated as the finalist in two categories, “Best New Product” and “Most Promising Company.” In landing this award, nTels has set an unprecedented record in the Excellence Award’s history as the first Asia-based company to win the award.
The winner of “Best New Product,” nTels’ IP Multimedia Subsystem Charging Gateway (N-Mediator IMS CGF), is designed to collect network usage data from an IMS network. In 2004, nTels implemented its N-Mediator IMS CGF to collect charging information from SK Telecom’s IMS network, the world’s first live commercialization of IMS. With this service, customers can now take advantage of IMS-based services as a supplement to EV-DO or WCDMA services SK Telecom currently offers.
Many carriers and service providers are turning to the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) standard, defined in 3GPP Release 5, to gain greater flexibility in next generation networks for future development and migration towards an all-IP network. The IMS standard tackles the issue of session-based communications over IP networks, providing a migration path towards fixed-mobile convergence. The expansion of IMS will enhance development of new mobile services such as Instant Messaging (IM), Push-to-Talk, and Video Conferencing.
To enable N-Mediator IMS CGF, a sophisticated mediation system was needed to extract usage information from multiple sources, use business rules to distribute the data records, and do it all in real-time. Another requirement of N-Mediator IMS CGF was to be compliant with the DIAMETER protocol for advanced authentication features, and to be interoperable with Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based network elements.
The mediation process in N-Mediator IMS CGF is different from traditional mediation systems because communication is often peer-based, which requires setup of peer groups, and communication sessions that must be managed, which adds complexity to the overall system.