Bridgewater: "Independent testing demonstrates [our] performance" -- BUT ..!

      

Bridgewater Systems issued a press release announcing that "it has set high performance benchmarks for the mobile control plane for 3G and 4G networks as part of the mobile packet core testing conducted by the European Advanced Network Test Center (EANTC)" 

See "Bridgewater Sets Industry-First Performance Benchmarks for 3G and 4G Control Plane" - here. See also my post - "Lightreading: Cisco's GGSN DPI Feature Under Test [Continued]" - here.

David Sharpley, Bridgewater's Marketing and Product Management SVP, is quoted saying: "In collaboration with Cisco, Bridgewater has set the industry performance benchmark for the 3G and 4G control plane. These independently validated results for the Bridgewater Home Subscriber Server and Policy Controller reflect our continued commitment to exceeding the carrier-grade performance and scalability requirements of our customers as they deploy next generation mobile networks." 

However, Light Reading has an unusual comment in their Bridgewater-Cisco DPI test report (here):

" .. It had taken the Bridgewater support team two weeks to stage the system. Due to high and variable message traffic rates, the team adjusted the processing threads, buffers, and in-memory caching parameters to achieve lossless responses to all 1 million requests. The Bridgewater team was extremely dedicated and worked days and nights to tune the system for the tests, and while we weren’t able to witness the system working live, Bridgewater did confirm the final results. In the future, in addition to testing the scalability of the Bridgewater solution of up to 1 million users for policy requests, we’d want to stress test the PCRF with realistic policies and charging rules, especially those related to advanced video and data functions, as well as test for carrier-grade availability and resiliency. "

Nevertheless - the willingness of both companies, Cisco and Bridgewater to participate in such test deserve appreciation - it is not so common by vendors (certainly leaders) to do that.

This is also a good move for Bridgewater competing on Cisco's attention (here ; see - "Cisco Needs a Policy Server"- here)  vs. its competitors - Openet (here) and BroadHop (here) and others (list of PCRF vendors - here).