March 15, 2010 - Interoperability testing of Bridgewater Home Subscriber Server and Policy Controller underway with LTE ecosystem partners

Bridgewater Systems, the mobile personalization company, today announced its participation in the Global MultiService Forum (MSF) interoperability testing event over the next two weeks at Vodafone's Centre for Test and Innovation in Düsseldorf and the China Mobile Research Institute Lab in Beijing. The testing focuses on validating Evolved Packet Core network interfaces to enable multi-vendor deployment strategies for LTE technology.

The MSF event, a global first to focus on multi-vendor, multi-operator interoperability spanning multiple sites, promotes and fosters compatibility and interoperability with leading network equipment vendors and operators including Vodafone, China Mobile, NEC, Starent Networks now part of Cisco, Huawei, ZTE, Alcatel Lucent, Agilent and Codenomicon. The event is an important step towards validating MSF architectural framework release 5 for LTE, developed to incorporate 3GPP System Architecture Evolution.

Among the products undergoing interoperability testing at the event are the standards-based Bridgewater® Home Subscriber Server for HSS 1.0 (S6a interface), the Bridgewater® Policy Controller for PCRF 4.0 (Gx, Gxc interfaces), and the Bridgewater® 3GPP AAA Interworking Module for 3GPP AAA 8.3 (S6b, STa interfaces).

Participation underscores Bridgewater's leading role as the only LTE control plane specialist at the event. The company also recently announced a multimillion dollar LTE win at MetroPCS as well as LTEtrials with five Tier 1 mobile operators in Asia Pacific and North and South America.

"Bridgewater's commitment to the broadest set of LTE control plane interoperability with major equipment vendors ensures that operators can adopt a multi-vendor, multi-access approach. Our unique 'control-plane-in-a-box' approach which combines the Bridgewater Home Subscriber Server, Policy Controller and Inter-working capabilities allows operators to rapidly and cost-effectively trial, launch, and scale LTE deployments." said David Sharpley, Senior Vice President, Bridgewater Systems.

"Operators such as China Mobile and Vodafone require extensive interoperability between vendors to accelerate the evolution towards LTE. The Global MSF Interoperability event in Düsseldorf and Beijing represents an important landmark in the standards-based evolution to LTE, especially in the evolved packet core.", said David Francisco, MultiService Forum Board Member.