Edgewater Debuts EdgeMarc 250 Series Session Border Controller

The 250 Series is designed to simplify the management, improve the performance and reduce the costs of converged voice.

Edgewater Networks announced the addition of the EdgeMarc 250 Series Enterprise Session Border Controller to its family of EdgeMarc products. Aimed at small to medium-size businesses and branch offices of larger enterprises, the 250 Series is designed to simplify the management, improve the performance and reduce the costs of converged voice, video and data networks by integrating enterprise-level session border controller features and flexible network connections into a single device.

List pricing for the EdgeMarc 250 Series products ranges from $375 to $652, depending on configuration, according to a company release.

Edgewater Networks addresses the challenges for the secure and reliable delivery of enterprise unified communications (UC), including device and protocol interoperability, security and policy management, troubleshooting and QoS. The company provides a solution that connects voice and video devices to voice over IP (VOIP) services through protocol mediation, protects voice and video devices with an application-aware firewall, optimizes voice and video quality through prioritizing and traffic shaping, and monitors the quality of real-time communications to simplify troubleshooting

"Enterprise session border controllers are becoming an increasingly important gateway for the delivery of unified communications services, such as VOIP and video conferencing," said Diane Myers, directing analyst of VOIP and IMS at Infonetics Research. "This is true even at the small to midsized enterprise level where the challenges of interoperability and policy management can be as vexing as they are to large enterprises."

It provides a 10/100M-bps Ethernet WAN, ADSL 2/2+ WAN, 8 x 10/100/1,000M-bps Ethernet switch, 802.11b/g/n WAP, four X FXS ports, one X FXO port and one X USB port. Key software features include support for up to 10 concurrent calls, VOIP and video-aware NAT/firewall, IPSec VPN, protocol harmonization for interoperability of VOIP and video devices, active VOIP line testing, call quality monitoring, survivability, WAN link redundancy, QoS and more.

The EdgeMarc 250 Series is used to connect analog phones, fax machines or small key systems/PBXes to the IP network. It provides a PSTN connection for failover and the ability to route voice and data over alternate WAN links for survivability. These WAN links include ADSL, Ethernet or certified broadband wireless cards using the integrated USB port. The integrated Ethernet switch is suited for workgroup environments, and the integrated 802.11b/g/n wireless access point provides high-speed data networking for mobile devices.

"High quality and reliability have always been hallmarks of our business VOIP services," said Arnaud Gautier, senior vice president of product management at MegaPath, a provider of broadband data, voice and managed security services. "The EdgeMarc 250 Series will enable us to provide enterprise-class session border controller features with lower complexity, at a reduced cost."