Cingular Wireless revamped its signaling architecture using a new regional star design supported by Tekelec’s Eagle 5 Signaling Application System and G-Flex home location register manager solutions, according to an announcement made today by Tekelec.

The star architecture replaces Cingular’s mesh signaling network set-up. It reduces the number of facilities required by 168 while increasing Cingular’s signaling capacity.

"If I release 168 facilities, that means I also release the termination points at each end of those 168 and the hardware is available for reuse. That becomes pretty massive," said Mark Enzmann, primary member of technical staff at Cingular Wireless and architect of the new star configuration.

Cingular couldn’t specify the savings associated with the facility reduction, but Will Dietz, lead engineer for signaling systems at Cingular said, "That’s a lot more than $10 in your pocket."

The architecture has been deployed in all five regions and allows Cingular to originate and terminate the majority of calls within region and avoid long-haul interconnect charges, which leads to additional savings.

Tekelec’s G-Flex numbering solution, also a part of the new configuration, is integrated into the EAGLE 5 SAS platform and facilitates the management of number allocation in HLRs. It also enables Cingular and other operators to dynamically rebalance database loads and fully utilize the capacity of HLRs. The G-Flex HLR manager maximizes HLR capacity and manages their growth.

"The G-Flex application allows Cingular to move in new directions and expand their network. It also sets them up nicely for the AT&T Wireless acquisition," said Stan McConnell, senior sales director at Tekelec.

Enzmann agreed. "The way the architecture is now designed, it makes it simple for us to draw [new elements] into our network without distorting the way we are set up," he said.

"It minimizes the ripple effect that usually happens in the network when you bring something new in," Dietz added.

During the course of the project, which began with the design last October and implementation from January to June, Cingular added 5 Eagle STP pairs and also added nodes for G-Flex capability in three more regions to complete the star.

The Tekelec EAGLE 5 SAS is a multi-protocol advanced signaling system that hosts a variety of applications from a single platform, including: signaling system 7 (SS7) signal transfer, number portability, signaling gateway, integrated services, and data acquisition. The system also supports the Sigtran suite of signaling protocols for next-generation network connectivity.