The Brain Surgeons of Diameter

I’ve been hearing something from the field that doesn’t quite sit right.

I’ve been hearing that developers of 3G voice protocol SS7 can easily segue into developing good solutions using 4G Diameter protocol such as real-time intelligent routers and reliable load balancing solutions. That’s sadly not true.

Diameter was selected by the industry standards bodies such as 3GPP to be the one protocol that replaces all legacy protocols (MAP, LDAP, Radius, and others) because of its extreme flexibility to support data, services, and applications.

On the flip side, that side flexibility does cause difficulties.

Diameter software engineers find that only after years of intense programming, can they succeed in creating cutting-edge solutions.

Only then do they understand why Diameter is the chosen protocol to support all the data dominated services and applications of 4G:

  • They know how to configure the code to ensure a 4G network’s 100% reliability to send the right message to the right location 100% of the time.
  • They can design intelligent routing and load balancing solutions to give the network unlimited scalability.
    However, this expertise takes years to develop and a dedicated team focusing solely on the Diameter protocol and here’s the secret.

It took the experience of deploying the Diameter protocol stack in operators around the world to learn the deep secrets and tricks of the trade of working with Diameter. And that is why today, F5 since the acquisition of Traffix, is the only company that can call themselves true experts in the field of Diameter. That is why there is still is no other vendor offering a full Diameter solution of routing, load balancing and gateway solutions with the added value that the F5 Traffix Service Delivery Controller (SDC) offers.

I would say that for others to claim, “we know signaling” based on past experience with SS7 or other legacy protocol is equivalent to a heart surgeon leading a team to operate on a brain without the back up of a brain surgeon.

My son wants to have laser eye surgery to correct his myopia. Am I going to look for a doctor who recently went to a short course to perform the operation, or am I going to ask everyone I know for their references, and then select the surgeon who has been doing this operation for years with the highest rate of success? I think the answer is obvious.

Published Jan 17, 2013
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