New Tools Bring Juniper to the Edge

Michael Capuano, director of product marketing for Juniper, says the edge now is the critical component in networking to allow service providers to customize the user experience and in doing so deliver new service models to help replace carriers’ declining voice revenue.

For example, Telenor has a fair use model for DSL based on Juniper’s ERX router and SDX server-based product that tracks customers’ per megabit use on the network monthly.

If a user goes over his or her subscribed bandwidth allocation, the system automatically sends the person an e-mail asking if that individual wants to upgrade bandwidth. “We gave them the tools to automate the whole thing,” says Capuano.

Also new from Juniper is an application admission control module for its E-series routers based on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Media Services 9 Series, a feature of the recently released Windows Server 2003. It enables service providers to set up bandwidth on the fly per user request. However, when adequate bandwidth is not available to ensure a high quality customer experience, additional users requesting pipes on the network are turned away until enough bandwidth is available for all, says Capuano. Again, this could help the service provider upsell customers to a higher quality of service package.

Yet another new tool Juniper unveiled enables service providers to sample packets (ranging from all packets to one packet per thousand) to understand what type of traffic flow users are sending over various connections. This J-Flow Accounting, as Juniper calls it, can allow the service provider to offer a different quality of service for each type of traffic flow (voice, video, data, for example) or to otherwise create differential service based on bandwidth, time or other considerations, says Capuano.

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