For Cisco and Juniper, the move to base telecom networks on white box switches and routers is an obvious threat, even as the vision of deploying virtualized 5G RAN with huge numbers of edge routers may be a good opportunity. AT&T has not only championed white box switches and core routers, but provided specs to the Open Compute Project (OCP), which exists to commoditize data center and network hardware, and break down the business model of the traditional vendors with their expensive integrated appliances.
No wonder, then, that Juniper chief product officer, Manoj Leelanivas, speaking at a Bank of America technology conference last week, was still pursuing the line beloved of his company and Cisco – and the RAN vendors – that they will support open platforms and disaggregation of hardware and software, but actually many customers really want to keep everything safely glued together after all, with the hardware and software components coming from the same supplier.
“If you look at white box, on the first blush it looks like, okay, there is a possible capex saving,” he said. “But if you deep dive, you find out that, no, there are multiple things you have got to do. There is software coming on top of it. Then there is system integration and testing that needs to be done. There is supply chain management that needs be done. Then how do you test the whole solution together and how do you support it all together?”
In the end, he claimed: “The actual operational cost and eventually the time to deliver the service actually increases quite a bit … What we have seen is that even in cases where we disaggregated, our customers have come back to us and said ‘Can you package them together?’.”
The argument is self-serving, though not always false – the added complexity of integrating hardware and software from different suppliers, some of them without significant customer support capabilities of their own, is a real barrier to the disaggregated model for some telcos. But disaggregation is moving well beyond just splitting software from the underlying hardware, and now operators are interested in mixing white boxes, COTS servers and underlying processors from different vendors, and matching those with a whole variety of different software, increasingly in microservices form.
So Juniper is evolving its 5G platform, and its arguments against complete openness, while it aims to rely on the sheer capacity of its routers to keep it strong and profitable in the 5G networks.
Leelanivas said 90% of Juniper’s R&D was targeted at software and that its Junos and Junos Evolved networking operating software support any levels of disaggregation that the customer wants. The company has implemented Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) interfaces, which allow cloud providers to program Juniper devices through the SONiC interface.
“We believe in openness, having programmatic interfaces and providing the visibility and automation and troubleshooting capabilities, and that is what is really powerful,” Leelanivas added. “It is less about the disaggregation between software and hardware. It’s more about the abstraction of the network via open and stable APIs. And those are the core principles we are driving.”
Juniper might be expected to play a big role in the current bid to establish a full US-based supply chain for all aspects of 5G networking. However, its CFO Ken Miller told the conference that its main growth targets for routers this year are Tier 2 and 3 service providers outside north America. In the first quarter of this year, for the first time since 2017, Juniper posted a year-on-year increase (of 4%) in its service provider orders.
Like Cisco, Juniper hopes the rising interest in edge computing, and in very distributed 5G networks that can be deployed in alignment with edge, will be a way to revive operator revenues after years of flagging fortunes. Miller sees expansion coming from edge, metro and access sectors, and from smaller carriers, rather than just selling core routers to the same base of Tier 1 telcos.
Miller added: “5G is the longer term growth driver which we are obviously ramping up for and expect that to pay off for us over the next several years as well. But really, it’s about diversifying on the [service provider] routing side.” He expects capacity expansion in traditional core and edge routing to ramp up, driven by 5G, in 2022, with the effect lasting for several years. Juniper is currently testing new 400G software and silicon in the field and aims to have some early deployments in the first half of 2021.
This comes a year after Juniper refreshed its portfolio with a strong 5G focus, unveiling new plans for metro, core and edge routers at Mobile World Congress 2019 and continuing to refine this story as that year progressed. Key messages have been stronger support for virtualized telco networks and better integration with cloud and edge infrastructure and services.
“The reason we’ve leaned in on 5G transformation is because the service providers have to transform the way their networks fundamentally operate,” said Donyel Jones-Williams, a director of product marketing at Juniper, last year. He was also focusing on the stronger growth potential in the metro and edge, rather than in big central core routers – especially because of the power of Cisco and Nokia there. Miller insisted at the BoA conference that operators and webscalers want a diverse supplier choice in the biggest routers, but so far, that market has stuck with the two leaders.
Hence why it is good news for Juniper that 5G will be even more distributed than its predecessors, with base stations and cloud compute nodes being implemented ever closer to the user to improve responsiveness and support analytics on massive amounts of data.
Juniper sees the metro or cell tower as the boundary of the service provider’s network and has said that “the infrastructure needed at the cell tower, all the way back to aggregation, will need to go through a refresh for 5G …. The one trend we’re seeing moving forward is we’re going to see more of the traffic be consolidated in the metro and edge, and less consolidation in the core network.”
Juniper offers its Metro Fabric portfolio and ACX700 universal metro routers to support this view of the world, and for the edge it has the MX2000 series 5G universal routing platform, which is powered by its own Penta silicon. For the core, it has the PTX10008 and PTX10016 universal chassis, which also use its own silicon, Triton.
Combined with Juniper’s Contrail software portfolio, the vendor claims its infrastructure offerings enable “a secure, automated and cloud-centric architecture that will unlock new revenue opportunities for service providers … the building blocks required to create 5G-ready networks built for simplicity and agility that are capable of supporting immense traffic demands for the future. By combining the attributes of secure and automated cloud architectures, Juniper is ushering in the next era of service provider networking.”