Infrastructure News: SBCs that scale; DAS underground and on the field

In infrastructure news this week, Target Field gets a DAS upgrade’ New York’s underground DAS shows its weak spots’ and Sonus upgrades its SBC portfolio.
Sonus ‘Lyncs’ customers to UC
Sonus says demand for Microsoft Lync is a big driver of its recent upgrades to its session border controllers. This week the company launched a new SBC and released software upgrades for its existing portfolio.
“The target market is large multi-nationals that are trying to get their customers over to services like Microsoft Lync,” said Sonus VP David Tipping. “These are products that help enterprises make the transition from older SIP-based PBXs over to SIP trunking.”
The company’s premium purpose-built hardware is the SBC 7000, which supports high-definition voice, rich communications services and voice-over-LTE, and can scale up to 150,000 sessions. In addition, Sonus has added remote upgrade capabilities to its SBC 1000 and SBC 2000 products.
“The platforms ship out with all the capacity built in. We software enable or disable those ports,” said Tipping, adding that Sonus is not charging a premium for the ability to scale, since customers may not know at first whether they will need to add ports. Tipping is confident that they will.
“We as Sonus are betting that customers are going to grow, based on our experience,” said Tipping, adding that it is not uncommon for managers to save “hundreds of thousands if not millions per month.” One of the biggest sources of savings comes from the ability to bring simple audio conference calls in house. Suddenly an IT manager has “four or five other people knocking at the door saying ‘I want to be part of it,'” said Tipping.
TE Connectivity hits a home run at Target Field
Fans at this year’s All-Star Game at Target Field in Minneapolis should enjoy better LTE services thanks to updgrades made to TE Connectivity’s FlexWave Prism and FlexWave Spectrum DAS systems. The neutral host DAS supports all four of the national wireless carriers with enhanced LTE services. The most recent upgrades add 1900 MHz MIMO and 2100 MHz LTE services.
The upgrade work was done by InSite Wireless, which has focused on in-building wireless infrastructure since 2000. The company was formed by employees of Mountain Union Telecom, which was later sold to Crown Castle.
DAS underground: Not all NY commuters get the same experience
Global Wireless Solutions has tested the New York subways system’s neutral host DAS, comparing performance not for different carriers but for different subway lines. Turns out the west side is the best place for commuters who want to talk, text and download data underground. The “7” train had a connectivity success rate of 74%, while the downtown “F” train had just an 8% success rate.