Time Warner Cable will use Siemens Networks’ voice feature server to add advanced features to its voice-over-IP offering, including fixed/mobile convergence, the two companies announced today.

The announcement is another victory for Siemens among U.S. cable players and also signals Time Warner Cable’s aggressive approach on VoIP--the company currently has 1.6 million digital voice customers among its 14.4 million subscribers and plans to use the advanced features to expand that base. Time Warner Cable is part of the Spectrum Co. consortium, which won Advanced Wireless Service spectrum in the recent FCC auction.

“We have another proof point in building our momentum in the IP industry and the cable industry,” said Harald Braun, president and chief operating officer for Siemens Networks. “Worldwide, Time Warner is a well-known
brand name and they have a significant amount of installed customers and homes passed.”

The two companies announced last May that they had conducted a field trial of fixed/mobile convergence services, one of the features the Siemens Surpass hiQ can delivery. The next-generation IP-based voice feature server can support up to 150,000 subscribers, and is part of a migration strategy to an IP multimedia Subsystem architecture, Braun said.

“We have more than three years experience with this platform, and we were able to deliver a scaleable and highly reliable system to Time Warner Cable,” Braun said. “What is next is, how can we come with the hiQ platform into an IMS environment? We make that very clear and very easy--you can flow in another two to three elements like the [home subscriber server] database or the CSCC [call state control function] or the media server, all within the hiQ family.”

In the meantime, he said, there are substantial pre-IMS applications that Time Warner Cable can use to build its VoIP base.

Siemens also supplies the hiQ to Cablevision, as well as to AT&T and BellSouth, and is continuing to talk with other major cable players, as well as telcos, in the U.S. and globally, Braun said.

“We have now changed from 14% of my revenue base four years ago to o-now 60% revenue today with NGN [next generation networks],” he said. “We are really an NGN company – the first building block was VoIP for traditional telcos and also a Voice over cable solution based on same hiQ platform.”