Excel Switching, NACT Provide Prepaid Products

Excel Switching Corp. and NACT Telecommunications have partnered to integrate Excel’s gateways with NACT’s applications and management software as packaged prepaid solutions. The combination gives service providers a platform for sending customized services over IP and PSTN networks.

NACT also plans to take the partnership further in the second half of 2005 with the release of a new product based on the Excel platform.

Excels AnyGen family of media gateways and media servers, coupled with NACTs IPAX family of application solutions and integration competency, will provide fixed and mobile service providers with basic and enhanced services working across TDM and IP networks.

Prepaid providers are under extreme price pressure, and customized services have emerged as a dynamic opportunity for revenue growth, especially in wireless applications, according to The Yankee Group, which predicts the wireless prepaid market will grow 24 percent by 2008. To accelerate revenue, prepaid providers are expanding the number of customized services that personalize a users experience such as multimedia messaging, ring tones, screen savers, file downloads and Internet browsing.

The Excel/NACT partnership will support the efforts of wireline and wireless operators to add value to their service offerings with the following:

Flexible software tools, allowing for product branding and customization;

Modular expandability to handle incremental traffic growth;

Full carrier-grade redundancy with NEBS compliance;

Connection to a variety of networks including IP, TDM, wireless, intelligent network or any of these combined;

Customer care, routing, provisioning and product management; and

Connection to global networks via national signaling variants, such as R1/R2, ISDN, SS7/C7, SIP, H.323, WIN/CAMEL, AIN and others.

In the second half of 2005, NACT will launch IPAX-XL, an integrated application server and gateway control system built to control the Excel Converged Services Platform, with native connectivity to TDM and IP networks. NACTs call-processing applications such as prepaid calling card management, fraud control, least-cost routing, operator services, call re-origination and VRU functions will be available via IPAX-XL, and can be combined with NACTs billing/provisioning and Web-based management tools to control, provision, bill and generate reports for a variety of prepaid, stored or shared value services.