… and the Mobile Backhaul winner is: Juniper Networks ACX Series Universal Access Routers!

[#1]

I’m glad to write about the IIR Carrier Ethernet awards reception I attended yesterday in Barcelona along with Penny Still representing Juniper Networks. It was a pleasant evening with many of our industry peers. 

                                                                

Carrier Ethernet is a fast moving industry that emerged in the last decade to optimize the data traffic in networks and provide lower cost per bit. Today, Carrier Ethernet together with the advantages of MPLS has become very popular and succeeded in replacing the legacy transport for Business Services, Broadband Aggregation and now in the mobile backhaul. With the growth of data in mobile networks, next generation Mobile Backhaul Networks must provide higher capacity at a lower cost but at the same time must embed key features such as Time and Synchronization. All that will result in a better experience to mobile users, with less calls dropped and higher speeds.

The IIR Carrier Ethernet Awards are very important as they track year over year the innovation in this dynamic industry and reward the innovation introduced by different companies. 

                                                                    

In the context of the Carrier Ethernet World Congress EMEA, IIR organized once again, the Carrier Ethernet Awards 2012 with different categories and a list of independent judges, including:

• Ian Redpath, Principal Analyst, Ovum
• Michael Howard, Principal Analyst, Infonetics
• Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO, Telus
• Nicolas Director, Network & IT Platform Strategy and Architecture, Colt
• Maurício Ferreira da Costa, Product Manager for CPE Solutions, Oi Brasil
• Yoshinori Koike, Senior Researcher, NTT Japan

Among other categories the judges were deciding the “Best Carrier Ethernet Mobile Backhaul Product EMEA 2012” with the following vendors competing: Accedian Networks, Cisco, Juniper and Overture.

And the winner is the Juniper Networks ACX Series Universal Access Routers. 

The solution was launched earlier this year at the MPLS WC and I published a blog titled: Universal Access Architecture: Network Simplification to the Next Level

Juniper’s Mobile backhaul solution is a L3/MPLS architecture that provides scalability, reliability, ease of provisioning, and the foundation for future services. Unlike other MPLS based alternatives, Juniper has the broadest portfolio off end-to-end MPLS features, a single operating system across all solution components which increase ease of deployment and time to market for new services.

Juniper’s solution can decrease the complexity of deploying small cell networks, reduce the cost of provisioning and management the network,  and lay the foundation for future layer 3 based mobile services, such as mobile video services, traffic and internet offload, localized content and caching, subtending WiFi services from PoE ports at the cell site, and M2M. All of these revenue generating or opex reducing services will be difficult to provision on a L2 Ethernet network. 

[#2]

Great blog post, David, and congrats to the ACX for winning this award.  For folks wondering how to easily provision and manage services on the ACX, check out the blog post by Srinivas Bangalore, Managing the Mobile Backhaul Winner, to see how using Junos Space makes this simplicity possible.