July 17, 2006

Juniper: YouTube driving need for more edge routing horsepower

They're not officially related, but it's easy to draw a dotted line between today's announcement of a new edge router from Juniper Networks and YouTube's claim of serving 100 million videos a day, with one (YouTube popularity) driving the need for the other (bigger routers in the network edge).

For the Juniper nitty-gritty on gearhead details like line-cards, capacity, etc., look here. What caught my attention most during my briefing call with Juniper last week was the inclusion in the presentation slides of the idea of large enterprises as potential customers for the ~$100,000-plus M120 router.

With more companies and consumers consuming more video, there's going to be a need for more capacity and control closer to the end user, said Juniper product marketing manager Alan Sardella, who sees Net traffic growing rapidly.

"It [the traffic growth] is partially a function of video, with the ascent of YouTube," Sardella said. "There's already a lot [of video] starting to stream across [the Net]. There's a general increase in traffic that is felt a lot more deeply in the core."

Whether or not regional telcos, the big players or even large enterprises will need Juniper's M120 anytime soon is something we'll be able to watch once the box becomes generally available in October. One of its features, according to Juniper, is the ability to extend QoS to Ethernet, making it "more like Frame Relay or ATM," according to Sardella. Does that mean that Juniper foresees a future with more SLAs, perhaps SLA to the home?

"SLAs are more or less guaranteed to happen on a larger scale," Sardella predicted. "One size fits all [bandwidth services]are not going to fit for much longer."

Posted by paul at 05:56 PM | Comments (0)

When a T-1 just ain't enough: Mid-band Ethernet to the rescue

Ed Gubbins over at Telephony says that mid-band Ethernet has reached a tipping point with BellSouth's addition of 2-, 4- and 8-Mbps metro Ethernet offerings. Worth a read to understand why there may be more equipment demand, as more businesses outgrow their T-1s but don't need 10 Mbps links just yet.

Bonus Ruckus links: Telephony covers a Ruckus announcement of new rural IPTV contract wins, while Telcommunications provides the down-and-not-so-dirty details of wireless customer-premise installations, which sure beats crawling under houses.

Posted by paul at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)