Redback  has announced plans to port its service management system (SMS) software to its edge policy enforcement box called SmartEdge. The combination of the two will give service providers the ability to aggregate customer traffic as it enters their networks and to apply service policies to it. Possible services include network-based URL filtering or VPNs.

The combination of SMS service features and the SmartEdge aggregation capabilities result in a single broadband remote access server (BRAS) to compete with comparable offerings from the likes of Laurel, Cisco and Juniper, says Ron Westfall, an analyst with Current Analysis.

He says he had been expecting Redback’s announcement since last fall. "It's about time," he says. Laurel, Juniper and Cisco have already laid legitimate claim to their own BRAS offerings.

Redback says its system architecture gives it the edge. Its gear can establish individual "circuits" to individual machines inside a customer's WAN router. Each circuit can be associated with its own service context, such as URL filtering or no URL filtering. By associating circuits to contexts, the equipment reduces the processing needed to handle each packet, boosting performance, Redback says.

Redback also announced SmartEdge 400, a new hardware platform that is about half the size of its previous SmartEdge 800. "The SMS 800 was a little bit top-heavy for non-top-tier cities," he says. He says he expects Redback to eventually phase out its SMS gear. "The economic realities of the service providers mean they don't want a separate SMS box," he says.

On the subject of separate boxes, Cisco is offering BRAS functionality on two distinct routing platforms -- one optimized for ATM-centric aggregation, the other targeted at Ethernet. Vendors typically offer both applications on one router.

For ATM-centric environments, Cisco has added enhancements to its 10000 Edge Services Router (ESR) that doubles its session capacity and increases performance by 250%, the vendor claims. The enhancements include the PRE-2 route processor, which is intended to deliver line rate OC-48 performance for 40-byte packets and support up to 60,000 active simultaneous sessions.

Cisco also unveiled a single-port OC-48c/STM-16c packet-over-SONET line card for the router as an uplink to a Cisco 12000 series Internet router deeper in the service provider network.