Juniper

Cisco to compete for 3G and 4G mobile multimedia delivery with Starent acquisition

Wall Street and the analyst community think Cisco’s acquisition of Starent Networks will be $2.9 billion well spent in order to seriously vie for 3G and 4G mobile gateway business from service providers delivering more and more multimedia traffic that needs to move from wireless networks to IP networks via someone’s packet gateway.

The packet gateway is Starent’s niche, and soon will be Cisco’s. Among the many takeaways from this announcement, other telecom equipment vendors must take serious note of Cisco’s focus on mobile. And in case there’s any confusion, that means Juniper, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Huawei, to name a few.

If all goes well, Starent will become Cisco’s official Mobile Internet Technology Group when the acquisition is completed in the first half of 2010. “Cisco is all about IP, but Cisco doesn’t have that kind of heritage on the mobility side. So this acquisition has a big upside,” said IDC Wireless and Mobile Infrastructure Research Manager Godfrey Chua. “This is the segment in the mobile infrastructure market that is growing faster than the others.”

A niche player but a survivor (through the dot-com and the telecom crashes from early in the decade), Starent already has marquis clients – including Verizon Wireless and Sprint, to name two big ones, and one assumes Cisco will inherit Starent’s client list.

Starent Networks enables wireless operators to deliver multimedia (data, video, wireless TV, games, etc.) on wireless devices. Starent’s technology is positioned to help operators deliver that content over 2.5, 3G and 4G networks. Starent’s role will be to play on Cisco’s video and IP strengths in mobile infrastructure solutions that will extend quality multimedia experiences to mobile subscribers on 3G and 4G networks.

“Starent already has a good client base in terms of service providers, so it gets Cisco into the mobility discussion more and paves the way for more discussions as more carriers look at LTE,” Chua said. “Now it will be natural to include Cisco at the table.”

More 100 GigE edge router positioning, but why?

The news is this: Cisco is doubling the density of its Aggregation Services Router 9000 edge router series, which puts density well above the 100 Gig mark. The new line cards, which will be available in the next few months, have 16 10-gigabit-per-second Ethernet ports.

Cisco is claiming top-dog position at the moment, but its competitors have taken turns with edge router announcements of late. Juniper expects to start trialing 100-GigE cards for the MX 960 edge router before the end of the year. Alcatel Lucent is on a similar timetable. Huawei expects to introduce a 100-GigE line card, as well. So, different day, different vendor announcement.

The bigger question is why? What’s really happening is that vendors are positioning to help service providers engineer the next generation of services, according to CIMI Corp. President Tom Nolle. The approaches equipment vendors are announcing are extremely subtle; the point is to be a player in the network edge carrier build-up.

The likely reason service providers are interested in beefing up the network edge is not to serve up video for over-the-top players more efficiently, but to get into the content delivery network (CDN) business themselves so they get a bigger cut of the revenue, Nolle said. “If a provider is going to get a piece of the action by selling CDN services, they need to provide a better user experience.”

This isn’t the end of the port wars by any means, and who wins the most carrier market share will be interesting to watch.

Juniper Networks wants to sit back, watch your TV

OK, so maybe Juniper Networks has been busier than it lets on, but the company is hoping its latest product push will help make telecom providers’ lives a little easier, and its own business a little more profitable.

The company introduced StreamScope eRM, a version of Triveni Digital’s popular video monitoring platform that sits directly on Juniper routers, rather than needing a new appliance or probe.

It’s the first time Juniper has done video analysis, but that didn’t worry Tom DiMicelli, Juniper’s product marketing manager in the Edge and Aggregation Business Unit, when I talked to him about the launch.

“We really feel [our solution] goes to market with the most comprehensive set of features and capabilities in video monitoring,” he said, basing that assertion on the company’s decision to pair with Triveni. Juniper even provided a handy graph showing where Juniper thought its product trumped the competition.

DiMicelli said embedding the capabilities was possible because of Juniper’s Partner Solution Development Platform, announced about three months ago, which allows select partners (Triveni is the first) to embed their applications directly on the company’s routers.