Siemens Communications is partnering with General Bandwidth, increasing its investment in the six-year-old equipment vendor and reselling its G6 media gateway.

Selling the G6 media gateway to U.S. service providers along with its own Surpass softswitch allows Siemens to address both line and trunk media gateway functions in the same platform, General Bandwidth said. Siemens will sell that platform to carriers as a replacement for their legacy Class 5 switches that offers a migration path to IP architectures.

As part of the partnership, Siemens’ venture investment subsidiary, Siemens Venture Capital, is adding to the investment it first made in General Bandwidth in 2001. The amount of both investments is undisclosed.

General Bandwidth has raised more than $195 million from investors since its inception in 1999. Among those investors is Siemens rival Alcatel, which poured $15 million into General Bandwidth in 2004 after partnering with the company to resell its G6 packet migration platform.