SAN JOSE--Seamus Hourihan, vice president of marketing and product management at Acme Packet, said this week from VON that customers dictate product development at Acme Packet. Well, 360 customers can’t all be wrong, so the company announced support for the Diameter protocol in its Net-Net session border controller.

Part of the specs for IMS, Diameter will be used for Resource and Admission Control Functions, which are policy servers, and Connectivity Session Location repository Functions. Diamter is an authentication and authorization interface between SBCs and policy servers for resource reservation for VoIP and other interactive IP communication sessions.

Acme Packet also expanded its partner list to include CableMatrix and Juniper Networks, and is testing Diameter interoperability between its Net-Net SBC and policy servers from CableMatrix, Camiant, Juniper and Operax. These policy servers help ensure service levels and use the Diameter protocol to communicate to the P-CSCF at the access border.

“We support tiered services because we enable them Hourihan said.

Adding Diameter lets Acme Packet’s SBC perform call admission control by making bandwidth requests to an external, centralized RACF/PDF policy server. It also enables local admission control and policing of the media bandwidth granted locally as it traverses the SBC.

“The new capability represents the precise control service providers want over their networks,” Hourihan said.

Last week, Acme Packet was awarded its seventh U.S Patent and 22nd overall for its SBC product family. U.S. Patent Number 7,151,781, entitled, “System and Method for Providing Session Admission Control,” was issued on Dec. 16, 2006 and covers Acme Packet’s flexible call admission control algorithms.

The company demonstrated some of the new management tools and 20 or more new features it introduced last week. The new features augment the company’s existing set of configuration, performance, fault and accounting management controls. They include Net-Net Session Analysis System, which is a new management system that leverages Radius call detail records for troubleshooting, performance analysis and traffic monitoring.