Acme Packet, the iPhone 5, and the end of telecom

How much is the iPhone 5 affecting tech infrastructure businesses?

According to this article at xconomy.com, quite a bit.

“The company’s future rests on delivering networking technology that helps mobile operators, internet service providers and enterprises handle communications in the cloud—voice and video over IP, as well as other services—more securely and efficiently. And that’s where the iPhone 5, and other devices like it, come into play,“ writes Gregory Hang.

Hang interviewed Acme Packet founders, Andy Ory and Patrick MeLampy. Ory sees wireless carriers changing their entire network infrastructure over to IP-based technologies—which are, of course, what Acme Packet sells, in the form of session border controllers.

“We think the internet is going to switch to a session orientation for valuable things like communication and trusted exchanges of transactions. That will require an end-to-end signaling system,” MeLampy says. “It could be SIP [the Session Initiation Protocol that Acme Packet is based on], it could be something else. I don’t think you can do it on a packet-by-packet basis.”

Furthermore, people using voice over LTE from carriers “may start using it for other sessions that need identity and trust,” he says. “So the session orientation might become a bigger part of the Internet than people think.”

At the same time, he emphasizes, “We do what we do without any change to the internet.”