Bridgewater Systems says that it has been selected as the network access control vendor for Sprint's nationwide WiMAX network. Bridgewater is the incumbent supplier of Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) services to Sprint's existing CDMA 3G network and will now extend its solution to support the WiMAX platform as well.

 "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 WiMAX network in 2008.

 Bridgewater has been selected by nine WiMAX service providers to provide a range of service control solutions. Fully compliant with the WiMAX Forum's Network Working Group Stage 3 specification, the Bridgewater Systems AAA Service Controller provides extensive mobile WiMAX support often not supported on legacy AAA servers such as device authentication and mobile IP.

Source:cellular-news