Tellabs Unveils Application-Aware Carrier Router
Tellabs has announced a new router platform for carriers and network operators, aimed at giving them more visibility and control over the rising tide of wireless-driven data, application by application. This intelligence could be used by enterprises to better manage, plan and provision mobile data requirements and carrier service offerings.
Tue, October 18, 2011
Network World — Tellabs has announced a new router platform for carriers and network operators, aimed at giving them more visibility and control over the rising tide of wireless-driven data, application by application. This intelligence could be used by enterprises to better manage, plan and provision mobile data requirements and carrier service offerings.
The SmartCore 9200 series IP "content router" sits between data aggregation nodes at the carrier's packet core. Each 100Gbps line card handles traditional tasks like data forwarding, traffic management and the like, but Tellabs has created what it calls onboard content and security engines, for packet-by-packet traffic inspection and security. A separate new software application can analyze the data and report on details and trends.
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This new application-level intelligence is critical for mobile data networks, according to Tellabs executives. "Today's backhaul infrastructures are doing IP, address-based forwarding," says Tom Doiron, director of product management for Tellabs, based in Naperville, Ill. "These networks say, 'I know where this packet needs to go,' and forward it. But they don't know that the packets are a streaming video from Netflix."
Carriers and operators today can use hardware appliances, called probes, to sift the traffic and pull from it some information about its characteristics, Doiron says. But it's inefficient, expensive, and mainly provides historical data.
By contrast, the 9200 models simply plug into an existing network and have the horsepower and brains to create real-time views of the traffic, classify it by application, trace the application's behavior and performance through the network, and store all that metadata for analytical reports.
With this kind of intelligence, carriers can troubleshoot problems more specifically and quickly, and build new services. "You can look at individual subscriber data to see how one customer might consistently have bad or inconsistent performance for a given application, or at a given location," says Doiron.
The application intelligence can let carriers craft premium services with guaranteed service levels. "In North America, on a Friday night, carriers report that about 40% of their traffic is streaming Netflix videos," says Michael O'Malley, Tellabs' director of marketing strategy. "The carrier gets only the standard data tariff of the customer's plan, and yet that traffic is consuming almost half of the network's bandwidth."
Using data from the Tellabs 9600, a carrier could create a streaming service, for an added fee, that would carry a video stream to a customer regardless of his location or client device.
Enterprise IT can expect smarter managed data services from carriers. For example, in the last week of each quarter data from the corporate SAP application becomes critical for quarterly financial reporting. Instead of having to pay for more capacity, Doiron says, an enterprise can contract with its carrier to identify the SAP traffic and give it priority on the network, for an added fee.
