By G. Christian Hill
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
Four of the world's five largest telecommunications-equipment makers, fierce rivals in
their day-to-day operations, are investing in a Silicon Valley start-up that is trying to
build a device to speed up Internet communications.
Telefon AB LM Ericsson, Northern Telecom Ltd. and a Siemens AG venture are
joining 3Com Corp. and Worldcom Inc.'s UUNET Technologies Inc. unit to put $40
million in Juniper Networks Inc., a new company formed by some of Silicon Valley's
top engineers and scientists. Industry executives familiar with the deal said Lucent
Technologies Inc., the giant AT&T Corp. spinoff, is also an investor.
Juniper has vaulting ambitions. It plans to marry advanced chip technology with a new
breed of switch router (a computer that directs data between farflung networks) that
can process information at rates of billions of bits per second. Right now, the top
speed of switches for the so-called backbones of major public networks range up to
about 622 million bits a second, but operators can improve potential through-put, or
capacity, by linking the switches together. Juniper and several competitors are seeking
speeds of 2.4 billion bits per second or more, and through-put rates of 60 billion bits
or more. The technology is considered essential to ending bottlenecks on the Internet.
Start-ups in the data-networking area always face long odds, because of the expense
of developing such complex products, the level of competition, and the presence of
Cisco Systems Inc., which is trying to squeeze out challengers by offering an
end-to-end line of products.
"We're very interested in what Juniper is doing, as well as several other start-ups and
some established companies such as Cisco and 3Com," said Vinton Cerf, widely
regarded as the "Father of the Internet," and senior vice president for Internet
engineering at MCI Communications Corp. To keep up with traffic, "we are going to
require speeds of 2.4 gigabits between our nodes by next year."
Cisco, however, said it is already in field trials with a device that provides performance
similar to the planned Juniper router. Richard Palmer, director of marketing for Cisco's
Internet service provider line, said its Gigabit Switch Router, or GSR, has 12 slots
each with a maximum speed of 622 million bits per second, for a total capacity of 7.46
billion bits per second. A fully configured GSR would cost $330,000. The GSR is
being tested by a large Internet-service provider Cisco declined to identify. Cisco plans
to ship a bigger version in the first half of next year that provides a speed of 2.5 billion
bits per second and a total capacity of 28.8 billion bits, Mr. Palmer said.
"This is a field we planted two years ago," Mr. Palmer said. "It's going to be a
challenge for a company even with such an extensive list
of partners to pull this off." He referred to Juniper's backers as "a bunch of players
who belatedly realized that the Internet protocol and
scaling the network is very important."
But Juniper's investors, in addition to the technology, want an alternative to
Cisco.
In an interview, Scott Kriens, Juniper's chairman and chief executive, declined to
comment on specifications of the company's first product, but said it would ship within
the next year. He said Juniper is trying to achieve breakthroughs not only in speed, but
in the ability to interoperate with thousands of devices and their thousands of different
applications and to track and bill for different levels of service.
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