Cisco Unified Border Element Data Sheet

Product overview

Part of the Cisco^® Collaboration Edge Architecture, Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE) version 15 is an enterprise-class Session Border Controller (SBC) solution that makes it possible to connect and interwork large, midsize, and small business unified communications networks with public and private IP communication services.

As a licensed feature set of Cisco IOS^® XE Software, CUBE has a wide range of capabilities that may be used to secure, monitor, and maintain business-critical connections and to ensure compliance with industry standards. Collectively, CUBE features provide exceptional flexibility when architecting highly available enterprise communications networks that save money and offer richer voice and video collaboration experiences to users.

Comprehensive interworking

As voice, video, and mobile communications systems converge to form more cost-effective, integrated collaboration solutions, the need to interwork diverse networks based on various protocols and security requirements increases. The CUBE SBC serves a critical role in linking these networks and provides a seamless experience for voice and video users.

CUBE is especially suited to facilitating:

●     PSTN interconnect using Internet service provider SIP trunks, which allow rapid service delivery and the possibility of capacity pooling across locations.

●     Migration from TDM to SIP public telephony trunk services. As a number of Cisco routers allow the concurrent use of voice gateway and CUBE features, a phased trunk migration is possible without requiring changes to the enterprise call control platform.

●     Certified connection to Cisco and third-party cloud collaboration services, including Cisco Webex^® Cloud Connected Audio (CCA and CCA-SP), Webex Calling Local Gateway, and Direct Routing for Microsoft Phone System (Microsoft Teams), with normalization to customer collaboration systems. CUBE supports high-capacity SIP media connectivity to the Cisco Webex cloud to replace expensive TDM audio connections to conferencing services.

●     Business-to-business voice and video system interconnect.

●     Multi-tenant solutions that require customer-dedicated SIP trunks on a common platform.

●     Codec interworking through the control of midcall codec renegotiation or transcoding.

●     Call Recording for Cisco Calling and Contact Center solutions

●     Multi-forking for compliance in the financial and regulated industries

●     Secure communications for the public sector including air gapped deployments

●     Topology hiding and demarcation between disparate networks

Note: Cisco Unified Communications Manager customers requiring business-to-business video features should use Cisco Expressway^™.

As CUBE terminates and re-originates signaling and media traffic, it is able to provide a secure demarcation between internal and external services, while interworking signaling protocols and encoded media streams between them. Further, CUBE provides a rich set of flexible session control features to secure and route traffic to different destinations and to apply policing and Quality-of-Service (QoS) policies.

Certain CUBE features may also be used with Cisco Communications Manager Express (CME) and Unified Survivable Remote Site Telephony (SRST) applications to connect with SIP trunk services.

Security and compliance

As networks become more interconnected, the need to secure information is of critical importance. Enterprises must comply with rapidly evolving industry standards for the proper handling and protection of sensitive and private information and for the proper auditing of commercial transactions. The comprehensive CUBE SBC feature set helps businesses achieve these requirements with:

●     Flexible security rules that prohibit unauthorized connections.

●     Behavior evaluation policies that can detect malicious call patterns, including Telephony Denial-of-Service (TDoS) attacks, and invoke an appropriate response – such as terminate, redirect, or record.

●     Interworking of encrypted and non-encrypted communication streams.

●     Replication of media streams for call recording solutions using either SIPREC or HTTP API.

Cloud communications services

Cloud call control products offer simple-to-provision-and-manage services. However, by their very nature, these services place a greater dependency on the wide-area connections required at customer sites. While additional bandwidth and redundant connectivity can mitigate this requirement, service providers can also use CUBE lineside features to ensure continued service delivery.

●     CUBE registration proxy can manage periodic messaging from Cisco Multiplatform Phones (MPP) or third-party SIP endpoints, reducing demand on wide-area connections and permitting larger deployments of endpoints.

●     Lineside survivability provides business continuity to SIP phones on a customer site should connectivity to the cloud service be interrupted.

Note: CUBE lineside features are offered for use with SIP-based, IP Centrex solutions (such as Cisco BroadCloud^®). They cannot be used with Cisco Unified Communications Manager, where Expressway and Unified Survivable Remote Site Telephony products should be considered.

Contact center solutions

CUBE offers numerous features that may be used to architect and optimize fully featured contact center solutions. Examples include:

●     Call Progress Analysis (CPA) for outbound calling campaigns

●     Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions

●     Media replication for call recording and analysis

Flexibility, Reliability, and Scale

Cisco offers industry-leading flexibility when it comes to deploying SBC functionality in almost any enterprise architecture. As CUBE is offered as part of Cisco IOS XE Software, it may be used concurrently with industry-leading IP networking, security, and QoS features. You can also choose from a wide range of host platforms to suit scale, performance, resiliency, and budget requirements (see Table 2 and Table 3). From IOS XE 17.7.1a, CUBE may be deployed in Cisco SD-WAN solutions.

In addition to hardware platforms from Cisco Secure Router 8000 series, Integrated Services Router (ISR), Cisco Catalyst^®Edge Router and Aggregation Services Router (ASR) product families, CUBE features are available for virtualized environments with the Catalyst 8000v Edge Software.

Stateful high availability with active/standby redundant pairs and clustering with SIP load balancers allow enterprises to build highly scalable, business-critical solutions.

CUBE licensing models

The CUBE features described above are licensed to enable three principal use models:

●     Trunking for service interconnect and protocol interworking. Trunk licenses are available for both standard (single node) and enhanced (high-availability and advanced features) network architectures to facilitate site-to-site and PSTN connectivity. Each trunk license enables a single call session in addition to a single forked media session for recording where required.

●     Lineside to enhance the delivery of hosted SIP communications services. Previously only available for the Cisco 800 Series Routers through the NanoCUBE license, CUBE Lineside client licenses are now available for all platforms listed in Table 2. Each Lineside license enables registration proxy and survivability features for one local SIP endpoint.

●     Media Proxy for advanced call recording and compliance solutions. Deployed independently from CUBE platforms configured for trunkside or lineside applications, CUBE Media Proxy allows corporate customers to meet compliance requirements by simultaneously recording or analyzing calls at up to five destinations simultaneously. Each Media Proxy license enables one forked media session in either standard or redundant configurations.

Smart Licensing

CUBE Smart Licenses allow for entitlement pooling and portability across all CUBE platforms registered to an organization’s Cisco Smart Licensing account. Providing further flexibility, Cisco Smart Licensing also allows the borrowing of higher-entitlement CUBE licenses if required.

Starting with CUBE version 12.5 (Cisco IOS XE 16.10.1a), all platforms must report license usage to a customer’s Cisco Smart Software Management service account.

For more information regarding Smart Licensing, see: https://www.cisco.com/go/smartlicensing

CUBE feature support

CUBE supports a comprehensive range of session control, security, interworking, and demarcation SBC features, many of which are detailed in Table 1.

Table 1.         Cisco Unified Border Element features

Note: H.323 features are deprecated from IOS XE 17.6.1 onwards. Refer to the Product Bulletin for further information.

Router platform support

CUBE is developed as a component of Cisco IOS XE Software and runs on the platforms listed in Tables 2 and 3. Maximum trunk session capacity is provided here for the purposes of comparison only. Operational capacity is dependent on various factors, such as call presentation rate, call type (for example, call center or standard IP telephony), transcoding, encryption, media forking, and the types of concurrent workloads on the routing platform.. Capacity figures are provided for platforms running IOS XE 26.2.1 or newer releases configured with the control plane memory listed in Table 2 and 3. While there is no minimum memory requirement to run CUBE features, maximum session capacity will be reduced if less memory than listed is used.

Certain CUBE deployment scenarios may require additional hardware for WAN termination or transcoding. CUBE supports all data interface types available for the host router platform.

Virtualized CUBE (vCUBE) is available as a licensed feature for the Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR 1000V) and Catalyst Edge 8000V software, allowing customers to use CUBE features in Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) environments.

CUBE features that require direct access to DSPs or voice interfaces are not available with vCUBE or ISR1100 models.

From IOS XE 17.7.1a, CUBE features may be used in IOS XE autonomous mode, or in controller mode as part of a Cisco SD-WAN solution.

Table 2.         CUBE Platform Support and Scale (max concurrent sessions) – actively supported platforms

Table 3.         CUBE Platform Support and Scale (max concurrent sessions) – End of Life platforms

Licensing options

CUBE may be purchased through a Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan subscription.

CUBE license subscriptions may be purchased using A-FLEX-3, A-FLEX-3-EDU, or A-FLEX-3-FEDRAMP offers with options listed in Table 4. For more information on ordering CUBE as a subscription, refer to the Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan Ordering Guide. Entitlements provided through Flex subscriptions are term-based and may be used to entitle any version of CUBE

Table 4.         CUBE Subscription options

Cisco environmental sustainability

Information about Cisco’s environmental sustainability policies and initiatives for our products, solutions, operations, and extended operations or supply chain is provided in the 2021 Cisco Purpose Report.

Reference links to information about key environmental sustainability topics are provided in the following table:

Cisco makes the packaging data available for informational purposes only. It may not reflect the most current legal developments, and Cisco does not represent, warrant, or guarantee that it is complete, accurate, or up to date. This information is subject to change without notice.

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Summary

Organizations large and small are realizing the value of SIP-based communication. The Cisco session border controller, CUBE, is helping these organizations take advantage of service providers’ SIP services by providing voice and video connectivity for both trunk and lineside services. As such, CUBE is ideal for businesses of all sizes; it cost-effectively supports a variety of SIP services, whether premises-based or with hosted call control, with the added benefit that CUBE uses the customer’s existing investment in Cisco routers.

For more information

For more information about the Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE), visit https://www.cisco.com/go/cube or contact your local Cisco account representative.

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