Starent Lands Major 3G Contract In China

Starent Networks Corporation today signed a multi-year, multimillion dollar contract with China United Telecommunications Corp. (China Unicom) to supply key data network elements for its mobile wireless network. Starent Networks is the only new player to secure a major portion of China Unicom's next generation network deployment.

Picture shows ST16 Intelligent Mobile Gateway

"We are very excited to work with a world class network provider in China Unicom," said Ashraf Dahod, president and CEO of Starent Networks Corporation. "This is a huge win for Starent Networks. The Chinese market is very well established and China Unicom's confidence in our ability to deliver a significant piece of its wireless mobile network validates our strategy and solution."

China is the largest mobile wireless market in the world with approximately 190 million wireless subscribers. China Unicom has over 60 million wireless subscribers and is adding more than 20,000 new subscribers a day on its CDMA network.
"One of the biggest challenges emerging companies have is in proving themselves in real market situations," stated Jane Zweig, Chief Executive Officer of The Shosteck Group, an international telecommunications consultancy based in Wheaton, Maryland. "This contract is important as it signifies a real customer in one of the most important mobile markets in the world."

The Starent Networks ST16 Intelligent Mobile Gateway will be deployed in China Unicom's CDMA2000 1X network. The product will enable China Unicom to provision data services at speeds up to 144 Kbps. Additionally, the product provides significant scalability to meet the rapid growth of China Unicom's subscriber base.
Starent Networks participated in an almost year long test and evaluation process, including extensive testing by China's Ministry of Information Industry, an independent government organization. Starent Networks' ST16 successfully interoperated with radio equipment from Ericsson, Huawei, Lucent, Motorola, Nortel, Samsung and ZTE. The solution also underwent commercial network trials and competed against all the major names in wireless data equipment.

Starent Networks ST16 Intelligent Mobile Gateway

Starent Networks has designed the ST16 Intelligent Mobile Gateway specifically for the mobile environment and its unique requirements. Acting as the gateway between the wireless network and core IP network, the ST16 system fully addresses mobile network issues, including multimedia service delivery, mobility, high capacity, enhanced billing, carrier-class reliability and a clear migration to an all-IP network.
Furthermore, the ST16 is unique in its ability to provision data, voice and integrated voice and data. This capability makes Starent Networks the first company to move mobile networking to a truly next generation architecture.
The Starent ST16 Intelligent Mobile Gateway supports high bandwidth and high performance through the following features:

-- Industry leading capacity, throughput and call set-up
-- Carrier-class, high availability platform - no single point of failure with 1:1 or 1:N built-in redundancy for hardware and software resources
-- Checkpointing, fault containment and state replication for enhanced software redundancy
-- Hot-swappability

Additionally, a distributed architecture significantly increases platform throughput, service capabilities, capacity and other performance criteria while enhancing the user experience.
Deployment of the Starent ST16 allows carriers to enhance their customers' experience through unique voice and data service capabilities, guaranteed quality of service, flexible billing and service packaging, and high performance networking.