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

New independent international software company delivers software product for operators, product vendors and system integrators to support implementation of advanced mobile broadband use cases across Broadband, Policy, Charging and IT systems.

MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012, BARCELONA, Spain, February 27, 2012

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, personalized 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 customization and professional services. Having to deal with multi-vendor environments and proprietary interfaces, such connections are difficult to implement.

BFX Unified Signaling Core

BroadForward’s BFX Broadband Policy Gateway (BFX Unified Signaling Core) is designed to help overcome these challenges in a repeatable, predictable way. BFX 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 customization 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.

Repeatable, productized signaling management

Taco Schoute, CEO at BroadForward said: “What’s missing in our industry is a repeatable, productized 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 platform 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.