BroadForward announces BFX, the world’s first Broadband Policy Gateway

Feb. 26, 2012 - PRLog -- Mobile broadband is one of the major drivers for the global Telecom operator revenue growth, which is forecasted by Infonetics to reach US$2.17 trillion by 2015. The last 12 months has seen operators starting to move away from all you can eat bundles to new, more differentiating, personalised bundles. Policy management has been identified as a key element in the execution of operators’ mobile broadband strategies, enabling more innovative services and pricing. However, many operators are reporting to have great difficulties to implement even simple use cases. Recent research from Heavy Reading revealed that operators identified problems integrating policy and charging as the single biggest barrier to deploying policy architectures. The reports points at the complexity of legacy charging and billing systems and the resulting challenges operators face in the execution, due to high costs of customisation and professional services. Having to deal with multi-vendor environments and proprietary interfaces, such connections are difficult to implement. BroadForward’s BFX Broadband Policy Gateway is designed to help overcome these challenges in a repeatable, predictable way.

The BFX Broadband Policy Gateway enables connections to and from virtually any Broadband, Policy, Charging or IT interface, straight out-of-the-box. BFX features a rich set of translation, mediation and service logic functions for a wide range of protocols, such as Diameter, XML/HTTP, SOAP and Radius. The availability and flexibility of on-board protocols and functions prevents high customisation costs or upgrades associated with EPC, IMS or BSS systems that are required to fit within targeted Policy Control architectures. Either standalone or as embedded software, BFX can simultaneously handle multiple connections and roles on different interfaces in the operator’s network, at a small footprint.

Taco Schoute, Director at BroadForward said: “What’s missing in our industry is a repeatable, productised way to enable Mobile Broadband use cases across vendor boundaries. Our mission is to help operators, vendors and system integrators to make mobile broadband work. With BFX they get a product which offers a very cost-effective way to achieve advanced connectivity. In many cases BFX will enable integration in a matter of days, rather than weeks or months. Next to that, it extends the economic lifetime of legacy systems by adding the required new connectivity features.”

With the introduction of new services and with it a higher frequency of updates and changes across many systems and protocols, more control over connections will be required. The BFX Broadband Policy Gateway offers the power to manage any integration challenge across vendor and technology boundaries, making it possible to maintain services while getting new ones off the ground faster and at much lower cost.

# # #

About BroadForward
BroadForward is the first independent international software company specialised in integration of Broadband, Policy Control, Charging and IT systems. BroadForward was founded by an internationally recognised team of mobile telecoms experts with a track record in building carrier-grade, revenue generating products and services for global mobile operators. R&D at BroadForward is 100% focused on improvement of connectivity and enrichment of Broadband systems. BroadForward’s software development is entirely done in The Netherlands.

Media contact:
info@broadforward.com

BroadForward BV
Nijverheidsweg Noord 60-76
3812 PM Amersfoort
The Netherlands
Phone: +31 85 489 5 689
Website: www.broadforward.com
Twitter: @broadforward