Openet, a market leader in offline and online charging and rating solutions for communications providers, has announced its participation in developing cable industry specifications for delivering residential Voice over IP services and related features. As a participant on the CableLabs® PacketCable(tm) 2.0 Accounting focus team, Openet contributed to the development of the Residential SIP Telephony Accounting Specification, which defines the cable industry specification for usage collection and processing for SIP-based cable telephony services.

“Openet was pleased to draw upon our experience and expertise in convergent network mediation and charging to contribute to this important specification,” said Joe Hogan, CTO of Openet. “Our participation in the CableLabs specification process further demonstrates Openet’s IMS expertise and thought leadership in developing and deploying high-volume, low latency network event and transaction processing solutions.”

The Residential SIP Telephony Accounting specification defines the collection of usage data and additional requirements for processing accounting events using the Diameter Base Protocol and specific IMS charging interfaces. The new specification ensures that residential telephony features which are currently available on the public switched telephone network (PSTN) shall be supported for PacketCable 2.0. These include the most commonly used residential telephony features and capabilities, including caller ID, call forwarding, call hold, call transfer, three-way calling, emergency calling, and operator services.

“The new Residential SIP Telephony Accounting specification will enable operators to track and optionally charge for telephony features executed by SIP application servers,” said Marc Price, Openet’s Senior Telecom Analyst and participant in the PacketCable 2.0 Accounting focus team. “This is an important step towards realizing the promise of IMS and PacketCable 2.0. Operators can confidently deploy new service features, knowing that these can be accounted for with existing standards.”

Openet’s industry’s leading charging and accounting solution for IMS architectures, is fully compliant with the PacketCable 2.0 Accounting specification, and 3GPP IMS Online and Offline Charging Releases 5, 6, and 7. Openet provides interoperability testing support for Diameter accounting within the industry, including ongoing support for IETF’s DiME Working Group, which focuses on Credit Control extensions for industry-standard Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) functions.

About Openet Telecom
Openet Telecom is a leading worldwide provider of event processing and transaction management solutions that enable service providers to maximize profitability, minimize deployment and management costs and ensure regulatory and partner requirements compliance. Our products – FusionWorks Mediation, FusionWorks Charging, and FusionWorks Real-Time Rating – and the solutions they enable, set the industry standard for availability, performance and scale in processing and management of network activity events and transactions in multi-service convergent environments.

With headquarters in Dublin, Ireland and offices in the United States, Singapore and Brazil and Malaysia, Openet Telecom has signed customers that include British Telecom, Cingular Wireless, StarHub, Orange Group, T-Mobile, TIM, Telstra, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone.

CableLabs and PacketCable are trademarks of Cable Television Laboratories, Inc.

Additional information is available at www.openet.com