Bridgewater Systems Expands 802.11 Solutions, Enabling Carriers to Offer Managed Wireless LAN Services to Their Enterprise Customers

Bridgewater Systems, a provider of dynamic IP and data service fulfillment and assurance solutions, today announced that it has extended its 802.11 capabilities for carriers to include managed Wireless LAN (WLAN) services for enterprises.

Bridgewater Systems, a provider of dynamic IP and data service fulfillment and assurance solutions, today announced that it has extended its 802.11 capabilities for carriers to include managed Wireless LAN (WLAN) services for enterprises.

Wi-Fi Service Manager, the latest product in Bridgewater Systems' suite, enables carriers to centrally monitor and manage thousands of enterprise sites, while providing secure, controlled access to enterprise WLANs for employees and visitors. Wi-Fi Service Manager minimizes on-site visits and service calls through remote configuration and proactive fault management. It integrates with carriers, customer care and billing systems. And it extends self-care capabilities such as user administration to enterprises so they gain a degree of control over their services while further reducing carriers' operational costs.

"Results from our recent survey (Managed Wireless LAN Services: A User Perspective) reinforce our belief that there is a place in the managed services market for a robust managed WLAN service offering," said Claudia Bacco, president, Telechoice Inc. "This presents an excellent opportunity for service providers to solve many of today's top of mind problems, including driving new revenue opportunities, decreasing churn, reaching new customers and capturing more of customers' telecommunications wallet share."

Wi-Fi Service Manager complements Bridgewater Systems' already supported 802.11 capabilities for WLAN Hotspot Providers, Service Providers, Integrated Providers and Clearinghouses. These business models are supported by 802.11 extensions to Bridgewater Systems' existing product suite announced by the company in November 2002.

The November-released capabilities were recently licensed to a leading multi dwelling unit (MDU) DSL provider, allowing it to offer WLAN access alongside high-speed DSL. With Bridgewater Systems' solution, the provider realizes cost efficiencies by managing and controlling user access to both technologies from a single system.

"Enterprises have shown enthusiasm for WLANs for a number of reasons, including increased productivity through employee mobility, reduced cabling and wiring costs and external access for visiting customers and partners," said Russ Freen, chief technology officer, Bridgewater Systems. "But small and midsize enterprises typically lack IT resources to deploy and maintain WLANs. In addition, they often experience security problems when opening up WLANs to individuals outside their company. Using Wi-Fi Service Manager, carriers can now offer profitable and securely managed WLAN service to enterprises at a reasonable price."

Wi-Fi Service Manager includes the following features:
. WLAN access for internal employees, partners and visitors.
. Remote monitoring and management of WLAN network, including configuration management, fault and performance management, security management, service level agreement (SLA) monitoring and reporting.
. Integration with carrier CRM and billing systems.
. Employee and visitor authentication and authorization.
. Security and bandwidth protection for the private network in the presence of visitors.
. Clearing and settlement capabilities, should carriers and enterprises agree to offer public hotspot service from enterprise WLANs.

Additional Bridgewater Systems' 802.11 products help carriers address complex 802.11 service and usage-sensitive billing challenges:

. AAA Service Controller provides authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) for users across multiple access technologies, including 1x, dial, DSL and 802.11. A user can have different credentials for each access type and may authenticate using different protocols, including EAP/MD5 and EAP/LEAP in the case of 802.11. Usage is always attributed to the right account regardless of the credentials and protocols used to gain access (in support of a single bill for the user).
. Revenue Collector and Formatter collect and store usage detail records across all access technologies. It filters, formats and streams the session records to the appropriate billing and settlement systems.
. User Session Controller prevents 802.11 account sharing, Xa necessity for flat-rate billing models.

Wi-Fi Service Manager will be available for demonstration at the CTIA Wireless 2003 Convention and Exposition in New Orleans from March 17-19, 2003 at the Bridgewater Systems Booth #3574.

About Bridgewater Systems (www.bridgewatersystems.com)
Bridgewater Systems provides dynamic IP and data service fulfillment and assurance solutions that enable service providers to generate profits from their networks while enhancing customer loyalty. The modular Bridgewater Systems product suite extracts greater value from existing operations support systems (OSS), business support systems (BSS) and network assets to enable service providers to realize new revenue sources. Unlike traditional OSS vendors, Bridgewater Systems' proven products deliver on-demand dynamic IP and data services, offer extensive revenue capture capabilities, provide out-of-the-box value and can be deployed in weeks -- instead of months.

Bridgewater Systems products are currently deployed by top-tier global service providers such as Bell Mobility, ICG Communications, Covad and Telia. Founded in 1997, Bridgewater Systems is a privately held company.