Stoke, Inc.

SANTA CLARA, CALIF., April 12, 2010: - The Stoke Portable Offload Lab begins its global tour of telecommunications carriers today. Stoke created the Lab – a self-contained network of standards-compliant communications equipment, configured to emulate real world 3G telecommunications environments - to demonstrate the capabilities, financial benefits, and ease of deployment of Stoke Mobile Data Offload (SMDO).

The Portable Offload Lab’s international itinerary over the next six months will include mobile data operators in Japan, Hong Kong, South East Asia, England, Spain, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, India and the US.

"The core network has become more strategic to carriers, and vendors are racing to enhance the vanilla implementations to create cores that support massive data plane scalability," said Caroline Gabriel, Principal Analyst at ReThink Technology Research. "It is vital to the success of early LTE networks that new and old vendors address these challenges effectively. In this environment there is an increased opportunity for breakthrough solutions such as Stoke’s Mobile Data Offload."

Mirroring the simplicity of the solution itself, the lab recreates a mobile data carrier infrastructure in a transportable format, requiring nothing but power to be made operational in any country in the world. It enables recreation of both user and operator experiences using non-offload and offload scenarios, including the insertion and removal of the application in the network without impacting subscriber sessions or requiring changes to existing mobile network elements. The lab incorporates servers, clients, and routers to simulate traffic demand and provide packet transport, with Stoke’s SSX-3000 mobile broadband gateway running SMDO

Stoke MDO is an innovative solution to offload mobile bits from the mobile core to a less costly data path while improving the user experience. Additionally, its insight and management capabilities enable operators to identify and maintain control of desired traffic types.

Market Drivers
The current generation of carrier infrastructure is ill-equipped to deal with the continually rising levels of mobile data traffic. Operators are in urgent need of alternative solutions to help them create modern infrastructures and business models to address the changing mobile environment. Moreover, they are seeking ways to extend the capabilities of their existing infrastructure while they prepare for investment in 4G/LTE.

Stephane Teral, Principal Analyst at Infonetics Research, said, "The 3G journey is still in progress, with myriad issues to sort out such as how to sufficiently support an iPhone and how to get voice over IP to actually work over 3G networks. Operators have an urgent need for streamlined new solutions that add value for future requirements as well as solving today’s problems. Stoke's MDO solution is based on Iu-PS breakout. This offers distinct cost and efficiency advantages over Direct Tunnel, since it relieves pressure from multiple network elements (both GGSN and SGSN)."

"Incumbent suppliers' solutions to mobile data overload are cumbersome at best," said Vikash Varma, president and CEO of Stoke, "They require re-engineering of the network and software and potentially hardware upgrades across the mobile data core and into the RAN, costing millions of dollars and countless weeks to deploy. And many of these solutions are yet to be developed. Stoke's Mobile Data Offload solution is a precision offload solution to a data plane capacity challenge. It is simple to deploy, radically improves the economics of the infrastructure and, by enabling greater control and visibility over traffic, creates a platform for the delivery of new service offerings."

Operating Scenarios
The Portable Offload Lab illustrates a number of offload scenarios, including: improvements in user experience; activating offload for operator-selected sessions; ease of application of policies to offloaded sessions; standards compliance; non-intrusive Stoke Mobile Data Offload deployment; and preservation of uninterrupted mobility in offloaded sessions.

About Stoke, Inc.
Stoke develops high capacity, standards-based gateway solutions, providing innovative ways for enabling mobile operators to participate more profitably in the user-to-Internet value chain and improve subscribers’ online experience. Stoke solutions intelligently address the onslaught of 3G data growth in all mobile infrastructure domains - Core, Backhaul, and RAN - while also ensuring a smooth migration to LTE. Stoke’s solutions address the most pressing challenges of mobile data service delivery, change the status quo, and dramatically reduce costs. For more information, visit www.stoke.com.