Toby Allen

Want to pick the best Session Border Controller? Consider these 10 things

· Acme Packet Era, Communications

Originally published at tobyallens.blogspot.com

Originally published on my personal Blogger site tobyallens.blogspot.com on 7 January 2017, during my time at Acme Packet. Reposted here verbatim from the original.

  1. Interoperability – Does the SBC you’re considering have proven interoperability with all the vendors in your network? How about your SIP trunk providers? Does the SBC have the ability to manipulate and modify any and all messages on the fly to enable your Call Manager to talk to Skype for Business? Does it support all the codecs that you need to run on your network? Can it transcode between them?
  2. Routing Flexibility – Can the SBC query external routing databases such as LDAP or ENUM? Can the SBC alter routing based on codecs e.g. route video calls differently? Can the SBC detect link failure and automatically try alternative routes? Can the SBC detect drops in QoS on links and route around them? Can the SBC transparently route across multiple carriers?
  3. Denial of Service Protection – Can the SBC withstand DoS attacks? Can the SBC continue to route calls normally while under attack? Does a DoS attack impact call processing? Can the SBC limit the impact of compromised devices on the network?
  4. Scale – Can the SBC vendor scale from small office sites all the way to large contact centres? Can they support 5000 concurrent calls? What about 10000 concurrent calls? Does turning on features impact performance? The capacity of some SBC vendors halves when you turn on encryption for example.
  5. Deployment flexibility – Can the SBC be deployed in a virtualised environment? Does the vendor have the option of dedicated appliances for better price/performance if needed? Can you migrate configurations and licenses between the two environments? Many vendors prevent license reallocation.
  6. Consistent Management interfaces– Does the SBC vendor provide a consistent management interface across all sizes and scales of SBCs? Many vendors have multiple different SBC products depending on the size of system deployed. This can lead to hidden management costs as IT teams have to learn configuration and troubleshooting for all the different systems.
  7. Real time monitoring and troubleshooting – Does the SBC provide for real time troubleshooting and monitoring? Can the SBC interact with other tools to provide end to end real time ladder diagrams and QoS measurements? Can you monitor signalling of encrypted calls on the SBC easily? In many SBCs the only way to extract signalling information from encrypted calls is from log files and there is no way to get a simple ladder diagram unless you load encryption keys into third party probes. Which few enterprise security teams allow.
  8. Is it really “free”? – Some UC/PBX vendors like to tell customers that there is no cost to their SBCs. They’ll throw them into a larger deal at no cost. The numbers need to be locked at long and hard. You can be sure that you’re paying for that SBC and those licenses somewhere in the contract. Perhaps the discount on the UC features isn’t as high as it could be. Or there is a discount on year one support that doesn’t flow on in subsequent years. Remember, nothing is ever really free. Also, don’t be sucked into paying “Third Party SBC fees” trust me when I say that some companies use these to bully you into buying their SBCs but will wave them completely to win the UC/CC deal.
  9. Vendor Lock-In – This flows on from the above point. If you chose to leverage an SBC provided by the company supplying your UC platform it may lock you in. There may be no easy way to deploy systems from another vendor. Say you’re interested in moving from an on-premise system from one vendor to a cloud based UC platform for your office users. Does the SBC provided by your current UC vendor support this? Is there a hidden license cost to allow “third-party” PBX connectivity? Hidden costs include counting each session twice because every call has to loop through the legacy PBX.
  10. Company Stability – Is the company that you’re buying your SBC from going to be around in 5 years? For example, Avaya may have to file bankruptcy as early as next month!