Juniper's mobile network strategy takes flight

Stuart Corner
Friday, 30 October 2009 08:41

IT Industry - Strategy

"The RoI is a whopping 560 percent higher with and MX 3D than with a competitor. The total cost of ownership varies depending on application from 47 percent lower to 77 percent lower and the 77 percent lower is with the residential edge where you add more subscribers."

She added: "'Green' is a 'must have' table stakes of the new network and with MX 3D we have reduced energy consumption by 90 percent...we are resetting the economics here."

Juniper already claims, indirectly to be the market leader in the equivalent product - the GSM gateway serving node (GGSN) in today's 2G and 3G GSM networks through Ericson whose product is based on the Juniper M20 and M120 routers. According to Perdikou, Ericsson has about 35 percent of the global market.

Ericsson, however acquired Redback Networks in 2007 and, according to Perdikou, has chosen to build its evolved packet core router on the Redback product. She claimed that this would put Ericsson at a disadvantage because Redback's share of the network edge of carrier markets is much smaller than Juniper's.

Juniper has come for criticism for the absence of any announced strategy to have products for mobile networks. Light reading earlier this week quoted analyst Catharine Trebnick of Avian Securities, in a research note, saying that Juniper needed to get a mobile packet core product and to develop its own would take $US250 million to $US300 million in R&D costs, she writes.

Trebnick noted that the other option would be an acquisition, but that Cisco and Tellabs had already taken two of the most likely targets Starent Networks and WiChorus, respectively out of the market.

Perdikou, however was dismissive of the value of these two properties saying that 80 percent of Starent's business came from one CDMA network operator, Verizon Wireless, and that WiChorus was largely WiMAX focussed.

Stuart Corner travelled to New York for Juniper's announcements as a guest of the company.