Call them what you will, broadband edge devices are getting bigger and better as vendors rev up the capacity and system availability on their products, and add support for multicast and better quality of service, to respond to demand for multiservice solutions that can scale.
Juniper Networks Inc. is among the vendors at SUPERCOMM this week with a significant new addition in this vein. The company has added to its portfolio a new broadband services router called the E320 that it says eclipses similar products in the marketplace in terms of capacity and quality of service to address service provider triple play requirements – including video streaming and high-definition TV.
A “big brother” to Juniper’s existing line of E-series routers, the E320 scales from 100 to 320 gigabits and can serve up to 128,000 subscribers with a single chassis. David Boland, Juniper’s senior manager of next-generation solutions, says that’s a sizable improvement over Juniper’s ERX-1440 box and similar products in the marketplace.
Because the E320 employs the same JUNOSe operating system as the other products in the E-series line, customers with existing ERXs will have a built-in comfort level with the new box, Boland adds.
The E320, which can accept traffic from any brand or type of broadband access infrastructure, offers advanced QoS based on TR-59, a DSL Forum technical requirement written primarily by BellSouth, SBC Communications Inc. and Verizon Communications, says Boland. He adds that the hierarchical shaping and queuing of the E320 enables carriers to manage multiple sessions per home, noting that many service providers are now delivering the triple play.
The box also includes multicast features to support multicast video and channel changing. Boland says the E320 can be used in IPTV multicast or TV optical overlay applications, as two examples. In the TV overlay scenario, the E320 can control the video stream, keeping track of such parameters as the duration of the video session so the service provider can bill appropriately.
Boland adds that some companies have suggested that the intelligent BRAS capability such as that found in the E320 should be integrated into DSLAMs. But that doesn’t make sense, he says, given that there are typically 20,000 to 30,000 DSLAMs in large-scale networks, so service providers want these devices to become commodity items. Instead, Boland says, service providers can and should do centralized subscriber management of the network, including DSLAMs or whatever access infrastructure is in place, using the E320.
Other E320 features include full IP routing, so the box can support VPNs; ATM-to-Ethernet migration features, including the ability to mix and match ATM, Ethernet and SONET on the same slot; and two 40gbps “turbo slots,” which have extra switch fabric interconnections to handle future gigE or 10gigE cards.
Given the large amount of traffic this box can handle, availability is key, so Juniper built into the E320 hitless SRP switchover; 1:4 switch fabric redundancy; 1:4 line card redundancy; APS port to port or IOA to IOA; and in-service software upgrades.
Pricing for the E320 starts at $110,000.
Rather than requiring carrier customers to purchase entirely new equipment to increase capacity and add triple-play features, Redback Networks Inc. has introduced new cards and software for its family of SmartEdge Service Gateway platforms, says Marco Wanders, Redback’s chief marketing officer, who adds that this is the company’s biggest product announcement since it came out with the flagship gateway two years ago.
New 10 gigabit Ethernet and 10- and 20-port gigabit Ethernet I/O cards and a software upgrade increase the gateways’ performance up to four times – enabling the SmartEdge Service Gateway 800 to deliver 240 gigabits and the 400 model to deliver up to 80 gigabits of “usable capacity” for Ethernet aggregation with advanced IP routing, and subscriber and session management. Wanders adds that Redback delivers that 240 gigabits of capacity in a quarter the rack space required by its competitors to provide that kind of performance.
Redback, which declined to provide pricing for the new cards, expects to make the slot-independent, backward-compatible cards, and software, available to customers starting this summer. The company is showing the enhanced SmartEdge Service Gateways in its booth at SUPERCOMM, for which the exhibition starts tomorrow.
More than 100 service providers worldwide today use Redback’s gateways at the edge of their IP networks to ensure their end user customers get the services to which they’ve subscribed at the quality level they expect, says Wanders, adding that BellSouth Corp., KT, MegaPath Networks and various small IOCs are among that carrier group. Service providers need subscriber management to scale their broadband services, adds Wanders, noting that more than 32 million of the world’s broadband lines – or about one-third – rely on Redback equipment.
The leap in capacity Redback is offering with its new gateway cards enables service providers to collapse their networks to realize new operational savings and migrate to Ethernet-based aggregation, says Arpit Joshipura, the vendor’s vice president of product management and marketing, naming BellSouth and BT as two examples of carriers that are already on this migration path.
Wanders notes most service providers use a BRAS network to serve residential customers and a separate edge router network for business customers. But service providers are starting to move to just one edge router network to serve both business and residential customers, he says. While ATM still is in the network and will be for some time to come, Wanders adds, all carriers are moving toward aggregation over Ethernet.
The SmartEdge Service Gateways – which now scale up to 64,000 VLANs – can be used in Ethernet-based aggregation, edge routing or BRAS applications or any combination thereof; the product includes both Ethernet and ATM service-side interfaces.
The programmable ASICs embedded in Redback’s new cards address network convergence because of their performance and flexibility, continues Joshipura. There are two in-service upgradeable ASICs per card. These ASICs can do deep packet inspection for a variety of purposes, including packet forwarding/routing, traffic prioritization, separating out “back traffic” (meaning undesirable traffic) and more.
In addition to the capacity gains and convergence benefits, Redback’s new product enhancements include multicast-level reliability; extended QoS capabilities; and increased availability features on its gateways. Multicast-level reliability extends the current capability of session-level reliability to ensure that all multicast video traffic can seamlessly failover to a redundant card without interruption of any kind. New QoS capabilities include full, hierarchical QoS at wire speed. And the gateways’ now have better availability due to in-service, interruption-free service updates.
Laurel Networks Inc. also recently added new line cards to increase the Ethernet density of its broadband services router, the ST200.
The new cards include an Ethernet-optimized network processing blade (NPB-E) that provides 10gbps wire-speed performance (not over-subscribed) and a new high-density 10-port gigabit Ethernet physical interface (PHY) card. The new hardware supports the subscriber management, QoS and security features that carriers need to reliably deliver IPTV, video, voice, interactive gaming, and other "on demand" services to subscribers, according to the company. Both cards will be generally available starting this quarter.
But Laurel’s bigger news around SUPERCOMM was that it is on track to be acquired for $88 million in cash by ECI Telecom Inc., which on May 16 announced the news. ECI sells multiservice access gateways and multiservice provisioning platforms (MSPPs), which are next-generation SONET platforms that support both new IP-based and legacy services, mostly outside of the United States. Dror Nahumi, corporate vice president of strategy and business development at ECI Telecom, says the acquisition of Laurel by ECI creates a company that can deliver end-to-end solutions to carriers around the globe.
Nanumi adds that ECI Telecom’s differentiator it is positioned as a second vendor to the tier 1 carriers. “They use us as a competition tool,” he says, adding that ECI Telecom is an innovator, so carriers use ECI Telecom to get their primary suppliers to give them the tools they need at the prices they want.
This is ECI Telecom’s second move into the Layer 3 space, he adds. The company’s first move into Layer 3 was when it became the exclusive distributor of the core router products of Chiaro Networks, which ECI Telecom also has the right to acquire as part of the deal.
Alcatel, which two years ago got into the edge service router space through the acquisition of TiMetra Networks, also recently came out with new releases of its 7450 Ethernet Service Switch and 7750 Service Router. Combined, the ESS and SR form what Alcatel calls the Service Delivery Architecture for Triple Play.
The new release of the service router rounded out the multiservice edge routing features required to deliver the full slate of new VPN services, plus higher-density Ethernet and ATM interfaces, according to Alcatel. The service router delivers a range of scalable Layer 2 and Layer 3 services, including virtual private LAN service (VPLS), IP VPNs, high-speed Internet, ATM and frame relay. The latest release also delivers new Ethernet, TDM and ATM interfaces.
In October 2004, SBC Communications Inc. announced a primary supplier agreement between an SBC company and Alcatel to provide network equipment and video system integration services as part of Project Lightspeed, the SBC initiative to deploy fiber-based connections initially to 18 million households by the end of 2007.
Ethernet edge routing also is the focus of Riverstone Networks at SUPERCOMM, where the company is announcing release 2.0 of its 15008 product, which adds support for IPv6, among other new features.
Inbar Lasser-Raab, Riverstone’s vice president of marketing, says Riverstone is the first Ethernet edge device vendor to support IPv6. She says that’s particularly meaningful for customers in China, Japan and Korea. And she adds that IPv6 is also part of the 3G standard, so it ties into cellular backhaul applications and move to IMS.
The company’s last release of the 15008 focused on reliability and scalability of Ethernet to scale to millions of resident and video streams for video, says Lasser-Raab. This release, she says, adds support for Layer 3 VPNs, IPv6, and ATM and other line cards to increase ports on the box. Riverstone, she adds, is not competing with products that focus on pure Layer 3 VPNs, but is focused on multiservice applications.
