RedBack Networks -- SMS 500,,,July 1999
The biggest problem small and mid-size ISPs face is one of scale. How do you deploy a network with high-speed Internet connectivity and low costs? After all, with fewer customers, margins will be lower without the right density gear. In effect, RedBack's SMS 500 fills this market niche nicely. A lower-density version of the highly-successful SMS 1000, the 500 can “put small ISPs on an equal footing with their larger counterparts when it comes to offering end users the full range of broadband services,” said Virginia Brooks, vice president of networking at the Aberdeen Group. Designed for smaller ISPs with a large number of distributed POPs, a single 500 supports xDSL, cable modem and wireless access technologies with 1000 concurrent subscribers. According to RedBack, all an ISP needs in addition to the 500 is a circuit from a broadband provider, a few RADIUS servers and a backbone router. This greatly lowers the cost of entry while maximizing transport protocol flexibility; an ISP can provision ADSL today and add wireless access down the road, according to customer need. RedBack's real selling point is its multicontext approach, which allows ISPs to partition the system into as many as 10 virtual routers, each of which can be linked to a different service. Contexts can be changed at will (reprofiling) to resell a single high-speed connection to a subscriber multiple times with a different service. The resulting subscriber service levels allow dynamic service selection so that multiple tiers of network resources are guaranteed based on the desired application. A subscriber can select one service to access a corporate LAN by day for telecommuting and select another service for evening access at a different QoS level and pay accordingly. The base system includes a semimodular chassis forwarding engine, control engine and a single 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port, along with 10/100 Ethernet, ATM, T1 and frame relay modules. The SMS 500 is currently available. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.redback.com. |
