Juniper touts new tools to ease network pressure

Juniper's new products could help service providers cope with the flood of mobile data

Juniper Networks has announced a series of network tools designed to help service providers better manage the rising tide of mobile data.

The first product, Traffic Data, will help providers free up space on networks by moving mobile data traffic across to the fixed internet, without having to wait for Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, the firm said.

"We think it's important that networks evolve to handle LTE in the long term, but in the short term service providers need to ease the pressure on their networks and Traffic Data is designed to monitor and then offload data to the relevant channel," said Gijs van Kersen, head of mobile and convergence marketing at Juniper.

Van Kersen claimed that the company's research had shown that almost 70 per cent of bandwidth could be freed up by pushing 2G and 3G traffic to the landline infrastructure via Traffic Data.

The second tool, Juniper Media Flow, is the first result of the firm's partnership with Ankeena Networks. The product will provide a content delivery network for different types of data, including voice, SMS and video.

"Our partnership with Ankeena allows us to provide wireless carriers with dedicated networks able to cope with the increasing rise of videos being watched and downloaded on the networks," said van Kersen.

The final product is an evolved packet core platform called Mobile Core Evolution, which will allow providers to gradually prepare networks for LTE. The system forms part of Juniper's Project Falcon to develop routers able to meet the needs of evolved packet core and future cellular networks.

The announcements form part of the company's attempt to keep pace with Cisco, which recently acquired wireless technology company Starent Networks to address the market for mobile services.

Juniper will officially launch the products at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week. Media Flow and Traffic Data will be available in the second quarter, and Mobile Core Evolution in late 2010. No pricing details were released.