Analyst says company's device largest broadband remote-access server on market
Redback Networks, the edge router maker recently acquired by Ericsson, Monday unveiled its third-generation system which boasts a twofold increase in capacity for video networks, as well as other enhancements.
“The primary [goal] was scale,” Redback CEO Kevin DeNuccio says. “We were trying to scale in two dimensions: We can deliver huge amounts of bandwidth for IPTV; the other dimension was to prepare for this broadband mobility where we have scaled the control plane eight times. You can put a half-million subscribers on this platform.”
That might help keep Redback’s momentum going in the edge-router market. The company gained a full percentage point of share between the fourth quarter of 2006 and the first quarter of this year, as well as almost two percentage points from 2005 to 2006, according to Dell’Oro Group.
However, Redback’s share dropped from 7.1% from the first quarter of 2006 to 6.4% in the first quarter of 2007, according to Dell’Oro.
“This is the largest B-RAS [broadband remote-access server] in the market now,” says Mark Seery, an analyst at market-researcher Ovum. “It’s s fairly impressive announcement. They’ve put that scalability concern to bed.”
The SmartEdge 1200 is also backward compatible with the first two generations of SmartEdge, the 400 and 800 series routers.
Redback believes that in 10 years, more than 2 billion wireless and wireline users will be upgraded to video-centric broadband networks from 250 million broadband users today. The SmartEdge 1200 manages at one time as many as 512,000 broadband users and hundreds of thousands Internet-based data, voice and video services, Redback says.
Fifteen of the top 20 carriers worldwide use the SmartEdge router platform to help deliver a mix of broadband, phone and video services to more than 50 million subscribers, the company says. They include AT&T, British Telecom, China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Korea Telecom and Telefonica of Spain and Germany.
The new router allows broadband users to receive standard definition TV, HDTV and VoD at one time, Redback says. It also will extend triple-play services to broadband mobile users by using the 1.4Mbps to 144Mbps of mobile bandwidth with QoS and policy enforcement, the company says.
Indeed, Redback expects the SmartEdge 1200 platform to jump-start a new category of megabit-mobility services, which will allow people and their broadband services to roam in between wireline and wireless networks. Megabit mobility also will make it possible for cable-TV subscriptions to be as portable as cell phones.
“Today the Internet is driven by PCs. What we see happening is a shift to the Internet being driven by the mobile phone,” DeNuccio says. “In the real populace of the world – China, India, Africa – people do not have televisions and they do not have personal computers. But they are going to have $50 cellphones. We are going to put the power of triple play in the hands of every person on the planet.”
It will allow businesses to do targeted ads based on a target’s physical location; and give people the option to use their network as their iPOD to get immediate access to large audio or video files online, the company says.
The applications integrated into the SmartEdge 1200 include deep-packet inspection for peer-to-peer traffic management, session border control and network security. This is in addition to the broadband aggregation, multiservice aggregation and subscriber management that the SmartEdge already supports.
Who needs single-purpose routers?
DeNuccio believes this sets Redback apart and that more application integration will be forthcoming.
“This is such a change that it will essentially dead-end any single-purpose router,” he claims. “The category of multiservice edge routing – we have redefined it. Not only can we do all of these applications, we can scale the system with all of them running.”
Ovum’s Seery says the “dead-end” claim might be overstating things a bit. Since session border controllers and other VoIP equipment are largely procured by different organizations within the operator, those capabilities will not be fully integrated into routers on a widescale basis as yet.
“I’m not looking for a large change in the market at this point,” Seery says.
The SmartEdge 1200 also allows network managers to perform live software upgrades, live maintenance operations and deliver videolike voice reliability for HDTV, VoD and two-way video conferencing, Redback says.
At the same time, the edge will approach corelike speed, DeNuccio says.
“We’re basically surpassing a lot of what is the midrange of core routers today,” he says. The edge is encroaching on what the core was. You’ll continue to see us scale up and try to minimize what the ultra-core becomes. Juniper (T640) and Cisco (CRS-1) only have one router that has more bandwidth than this.”
