NSN, Juniper team up to tackle Carrier Ethernet

Infrastructure vendor Nokia Siemens Networks has teamed up with security and network infrastructure firm Juniper Networks to bolster their offerings in the Carrier Ethernet space.

Under the agreement, the two companies will form a joint venture to address the Carrier Ethernet market. Headquartered in the Netherlands, the venture extends the previously announced partnership designed to deliver a fully interoperable Carrier Ethernet platform for mobile backhaul, business services and residential broadband networks.

The deal includes Juniper’s MX Series Ethernet Services Routers, NSN’s A-series Carrier Ethernet Switches as well as the Finnish firm’s network management system, which NSN claims can reduce OPEX on network administration by as much as 80 per cent.

The new offering should be available to carriers by the fourth quarter of 2009, the companies said.

Mobile backhaul is seen by some as a safe growth market due to the explosion of mobile data usage, which has shifted bottlenecks from the radio interface upstream to the backhaul network. Industry analyst Informa Telecoms & Media recently put the total number of mobile broadband subscriptions at 178.2 million at the end of 2008. This represents extraordinary growth given that Verizon, the largest operator in terms of mobile broadband subscriber numbers (24.245 million), only registered its first such subscribers at the end of 2004.

Statistics released by Informa found that revenues generated by non-voice services reached $188.7bn in 2008, increasing 24 per cent year on year in 2008 and delivering around 15 per cent of all revenues generated by mobile operators worldwide.

And while the majority of the non-voice revenues are still SMS-based, at the end of 2008, $75.1bn, or 40 per cent of this revenue stream came from non-SMS services, bolstered by the deployment of technologies such as HSPA and the growing demand for data-optimised devices such the Apple iPhone.