Start-up Seranoa Networks last week launched products designed to give IP service providers a lower-cost alternative to edge aggregation routers from Cisco, Juniper and others.
BOXBOROUGH, MASS. – Start-up Seranoa Networks last week launched products designed to give IP service providers a lower-cost alternative to edge aggregation routers from Cisco, Juniper and others.
The company’s WANport T3 Edge Concentrators are “IP-aware” Layer 2 switches targeted at facilities-based ISPs. The products are intended to let ISPs avoid performance degradation and rising costs associated with adding subscriber capacity and new IP services to their networks.
Line cards for subscriber aggregation account for most of an edge router’s cost, Seranoa says. And as advanced IP services are deployed, the throughput performance of the edge router becomes nearly impossible to predict, the company says.
ISPs, therefore, face an ongoing challenge to cost-effectively aggregate and manage the increasing number of subscriber channels arriving at their network’s points of presence. A mismatch in performance and economics occurs at these POPs, with channelized data flowing into the I/O ports of edge routers at aggregate speeds lower than the typical edge router is capable of supporting, and at a cost higher than necessary, Seranoa says.
Consequently, ISPs cannot widely deploy services that are processor-intensive on their edge routers, such as Multilink PPP and IP class-of-service, the company says.
Seranoa’s WANport concentrators front-end existing edge routers to produce cost, capacity and performance benefits over the procurement of additional routers or subscriber-line cards to expand a POP, Seranoa claims. The 1 rack unit-high devices aggregate up to 12 channelized T-3 access circuits onto redundant Gigabit Ethernet trunks for connectivity to edge routers.
As a result, WANport concentrators reduce subscriber port costs by 75%, multiply subscriber capacity by five or more, and boost processor support for IP services, Seranoa says.
Global NAPs, a national provider of Internet and leased transport services to other service providers, says the savings from Seranoa equipment could be passed on to its customers.
“Neat product,” says Barton Bruce, vice president of technology at Global NAPs. “With a Seranoa box, we could drop 12 T-3s into 12 separate central offices, and say, ‘OK fellas, we have bargain-basement prices for T-1s delivered to the following 12 cities.'”
The WANport T-3 Edge Concentrators support a mix of DS-3, NxDS-1, DS-1, NxDS-0, and DS-0 subscriber access channels. They are available now for $48,000.
Seranoa was founded in 2000 and has $15.8 million in venture funding from St. Paul Venture Capital, YankeeTek Ventures, Advent International, FA Technology Ventures and Schoffstall Ventures.
