To: Howard Feinstein who wrote (23618 ) 3/13/1999 9:30:00 PM From: jach Respond to of 77398
Start-Up: Optical IP Routers Are The Future (03/09/99, 1:14 p.m. ET) By John Dunn, Network Week IP routers based on optical technology and MPLS are about to sweep away the current generation of multiprotocol routers, according to U.S. routing start-up Juniper Networks. This was the opinion of the company's CEO and founder, Scott Kriens, when he announced the European availability of Juniper's debut product, the 40-gigabit-per-second M40 backbone router, last week. He said the router was already being used by MCI-WorldCom and being assessed by a number of other major carriers, including British Telecommunications. Kriens said the product would initially be aimed at meeting the bandwidth demands of ISPs, but he also speculated the underlying optical and MPLS technology could become a building block of corporate WANs within three years. "Internet routing is utterly different from the multiprotocol routing of the past. The market for IP infrastructure requires products that are built from the ground up for the Internet," he said. Despite its technology being unproven, Juniper has attracted a lot of attention in the United States after stealing a lead over Cisco with its JUNOS routing OS, core optical technology, and innovative ASIC designs. In terms of raw packet-forwarding, the M40 is still the performance leader in its class, many months after its U.S. launch. Kriens was predictably critical of Cisco, despite identifying the company as Juniper's chief rival, saying it had been slow to adopt new routing architectures. He said San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco was too preoccupied with protecting its investment in IOS and "legacy" routing architectures. The M40 incorporates the Internet Engineering Task Force's MPLS, one of the first shipping products to do so, has interfaces for ATM, SDH/SONET, and Gigabit Ethernet networks, and also supports direct connection to DWDM hardware. It has a starting price of 34,000 pounds ($55,014) plus 15,000 pounds ($24,270) per module.