Acme Claims UK Compliance

STOCKHOLM -- Acme Packet® will publicly demonstrate complete compliance with the British VoIP interconnect standard this week at the 2006 Spring VON Europe Conference and Exhibition in Stockholm, Sweden. The addition of one new transport protocol, SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol), to Acme Packet´s feature-rich Net-Net® session border controllers (SBCs) completes the protocol and feature set required for NICC compliance.

The Network Interoperability Consultative Committee (NICC), a working group of the United Kingdom´s regulatory body Ofcom, has specified connectivity standards for PSTN/ISDN services between next generation networks using IP-to-IP interconnects. Acme Packet´s Net-Net SBCs completely implement all of the functional elements defined by the NICC architecture including the Edge Session Control, Bandwidth Management, Signaling Border and Media Border functions. These functions may be integrated on a single SBC hardware and software platform or distributed across distinct signaling control and media control platforms using the ETSI TISPAN H.248 border gateway control protocol.

In this first of its kind public demonstration of NICC compliance, calls will be placed between two Net-Net SBCs using the NICC standards. These standards call for the use of SIP signaling encrypted in IPSec and using SCTP as the transport protocol between service provider networks. Acme Packet will also demonstrate the interworking of transport protocols -- SCTP, UDP and TCP -- and encryption options -- IPSec, TLS and no encryption. This multi-faceted interworking enables any softswitch which does not support SCTP to be used within a service provider´s network as the NICC Source Session Control function. It can also free the softswitch from having to use processor intensive IPSec encryption within the provider´s private network, increasing its scalability and reducing costs.

Acme Packet Inc. (Nasdaq: APKT)