Internet co-founder unveils revolutionary router

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 07 August 2007 02:54

Business IT - Technology

Dr Larry Roberts, one of the co-founders the Internet, has launched a new networking company, Anagran and its first product, the FR-1000 Flow Router, designed to meet the demands of the new generation of video, voice, data and wireless applications.

The FR-1000 is claimed to be the first product to eliminate network performance issues with these applications, and to have the lowest energy consumption of any comparable router at a fraction of the price of traditional layer 3 routers.

Roberts said: "Large fixed rate flows like video are not supported well with current routers which have freeze-frame, jitter, and general scalability challenges under even the most moderate levels of network congestion. As the traffic changes, we can't rely on this last-generation packet technology, which has essentially remained unchanged for 40 years, to power Internet performance...Existing products won't effectively deliver IPTV, video-on-demand, and VoIP mixed with P2P and other upcoming types of traffic we haven't even seen yet."

Roberts added: "Users and providers are also more sophisticated and they won't stand for stuttering video, truncated or dropped words during VoIP calls, slow web service, and emergency services that you can't count on. Anagran will change all of that: we'll support the demands of this generation and the next."

The Anagran FR-1000 Flow Router is claimed to be totally compatible with a standard layer 3 router but in addition "intelligently watches and constantly evaluates all flows travelling through it." Rather than only being able to process and route a disjointed succession of individual packets, Anagran's Fast Flow Routing architecture is said to look at each packet as part of its higher level flow and, based on specified priorities, to intelligently deliver the most critical information at the highest quality of performance.

This is accomplished through Anagran's 'Intelligent Flow Discard' technology, billed as "a totally new approach to traffic control and congestion management which proactively meters all incoming flows by class to fill the output capacity to a sustained 90 – 95 percent, virtually eliminating delay and packet losses caused by traditional routers' large output queues under traffic overload."