Sprint selects Bridgewater as vendor for XOHM 
ConvergenceAsia staff
03/06/2008

Subscriber-centric service control vendor Bridgewater Systems has announced its selection as the network access control vendor for Sprint’s new nationwide XOHM WiMAX Network. XOHM, a business division of wireless pioneer Sprint Nextel, is powered by WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access), a wireless internet technology designed to provide reliable, broadband connections over large areas – even in challenging city environments.

Bridgewater, the incumbent supplier of Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting (AAA) services to Sprint’s existing CDMA 3G network, will now extend its solution to support XOHM as well.

Through the capabilities of the Bridgewater solution, Sprint will be able to provide high performance network access control, and support open network access services such as over the air provisioning of devices, subscribers and on-demand service models, and lawful intercept services.

“Bridgewater is a valued partner, and has provided extremely reliable services to us for the CDMA network over the years,” said Douglas Smith, chief technical operations officer, Sprint Nextel. “Their ability to extend the existing platform to meet our current and planned needs for WiMAX, while still also servicing our CDMA network, is extremely cost-beneficial.”

By being agnostic to various access technologies as well as vendor-specific solutions, the Bridgewater solution is able to support a wide array of access networks and interoperate with multiple network vendor equipment types from a single platform. Within Sprint, Bridgewater will provide concurrent support for 3G and 4G networks from a common infrastructure as Sprint begins to commercially deploy the XOHM WiMAX network in 2008.

Said Phil Thrasher, senior vice president worldwide sales, services and marketing for Bridgewater Systems, “Our solution is able to interoperate with a broad range of vendor equipment types providing Sprint with the flexibility to evolve their network and accelerate time to market for new services.”

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