Cellular and IP equipment markets used to be distinct, but mobile carriers are increasingly converging both platforms, and their vendors will have to follow suit. Alcatel-Lucent centered its recent reorganization around two key businesses ‘ IP and mobile ‘ and most major suppliers will need to provide an integrated cellular/IP portfolio. Huawei probably has the widest reach, though Cisco and Ericsson are both end-to-end providers, even though their real strengths lie on just one side of the fence (IP for Cisco, mobile for Ericsson). NSN is seeking to join the converged front ranks too, by extending its four-year joint venture with Juniper Networks ‘ itself trying to fight off Cisco and ALU to build up its position in carrier routers.
Edge routers are a particularly important element of the IP/cellular landscape as traffic and subscriber levels rise exponentially. ALU put its IP routers, with a roadmap to higher capacity and software defined networking (SDN), at the heart of its latest restructuring, which identified IP as the main growth business for the troubled vendor. This may have helped drive rival NSN to announce the wider alliance with Juniper, which was expanded last month to include joint development of products for LTE mobile backhaul, LTE and 2G/3G radio access encryption, mobile infrastructure upgrades and IPv4-to-IPv6 migration.
In packet backhaul, the companies have created a new end-to-end Reference Framework to guarantee interworking between Juniper routers and NSN base stations and packet core. Juniper backhaul will also be integrated into NSN NetAct and Juniper JunosSpace for end-to-end radio and backhaul management and security.
On the security side, NSN base stations will come with built-in IPSec functionality and a Juniper Security Gateway for encryption and firewall functionality. Meanwhile, the NSN Mobile Site Connectivity Solution (MSCS) will be a recommended combination of MX and EX routers with NSN design guidelines on how to interconnect its mobile equipment internally using IP/Ethernet technology, or externally using IP/MPLS transport networks.
All this reflects the need for OEMs to offer end-to-end solutions in order to maximize their footprint within a major carrier deployment and fend off the threat of specialized, best-of-breed products. But the narrowing margins on hardware often do not justify the massive R&D involved, unless the vendor is a major market leader. Hence we will see an increasing number of partnerships like that of Juniper and NSN, and even mergers, to try to build a platform akin to the all-embracing offerings of Ericsson, Cisco or Huawei.
After working together for four years, NSN and Juniper understand each other well and have leadership potential in mobile security. So the timing is good to extend their partnership, just as carriers are seriously converging their cellular and IP networks. But both will have to step up the pace of upgrading their respective products. Most recently, Juniper has been seeking to negate the recent advantage seized by Alcatel-Lucent in this space with the latest additions to its MX range, which will also put pressure on Cisco.
Juniper has expanded system capacity across the 10-router MX family with new line cards, plus switch fabric modules for the 240, 480 and 960 models. The idea is to preserve investments in MX while meeting new traffic and subscriber loads.
The MS-MIC (Multiservice Modular Interface Card)supports 9Gbps of capacity for services running on Juniper’s Junos platform ‘ such as Junos Address Aware, which helps operators conserve and extend their IPv4 address pool; Junos Network Secure, which delivers stateful firewall services; Junos Traffic Vision, for flow monitoring; and Junos VPN Site Secure, for Layer 3 VPN encryption. And the MS-MPC (Multiservice Modular Port Concentrator) supports 60Gbps of services capacity.
With these and the other various upgrade options, the routers are designed to scale up to 860Gbps per slot, and then to 2Tbps per slot with system capacities of 40Tbps to 80Tbps, Juniper has said. Cisco also plans a 2Tbps-per-slot upgrade for its core and edge routers. The leader’s ASR 9000 edge router family scales up to 96Tbps. Alcatel-Lucent has been increasingly successful in carrier routers with its 7750 Service Router and 7705 Service Aggregation Router, plus the 7950 XRS core router, which scales up to 32Tbps of system capacity.