Starent Networks Corporation, which offer next generation intelligent mobile infrastructure solutions, today announced a new contract with China United Telecommunications Corp. (China Unicom) to provide infrastructure equipment and services to meet the demands of subscriber growth.

Since the introduction of China Unicom's CDMA network in January 2002, its subscriber base has grown rapidly, totaling more than 22.5 million and becoming the second largest CDMA network in the world. The contract calls for Starent Networks to deliver Starent ST16 equipment to address the growing subscriber base while also adding new services and features. These services include enterprise quality virtual private networking, enhanced charging services for unique billing capabilities and others. The multi-million dollar contract calls for deployment of equipment and services through the remainder of 2004.

Starent Networks has designed the ST16 Intelligent Mobile Gateway specifically for the requirements of the mobile environment. The gateway sits at the edge of the wireless network and core IP network. In this role of the network architecture, the ST16 system addresses many mobile network issues, including voice, data and multimedia service delivery, mobility, high capacity, enhanced service billing, carrier-class reliability and a clear migration to an all-IP network.

The Starent ST16 provides mobile operators with a high availability system that allows carriers to enhance their customers' experience through a high performance network that can deliver services 'in-line' of the call flow, without having to be offloaded to other infrastructure such as servers. These in-line services are able to rapidly inspect and manipulate packet traffic without the added call latency caused when services are routed to a server or other network element. Examples of in-line services include application layer compression, content filtering, enhanced billing, proxying and many others.