MWC: Ericsson converging IP and wireless portfolios

As wireless networks become IP-centric, Ericsson’s (NASDAQ:ERIC) IP division has been creeping gradually into its wireless networks unit’s turf. It started with the gateways of long-term evolution (LTE) evolved packet core, which Ericsson handed off to its engineers in San Jose to build on Ericsson’s SmartEdge router platform. Then Ericsson’s chief technology officer Håkan Eriksson left sunny Stockholm for the bleak shores of the Bay Area to head up the new IP group. Now Ericsson is embracing the wireless-IP integration whole hog, announcing plans to develop its future IP networking portfolio as a network agnostic product line.

At Mobile World Congress next week, Ericsson is demoing the first product to come out of the new strategy, its Smart Services Router, which can be deployed in both wireline and wireless or networks, or if you happen to be a mobile operator with a wireless business, right in the middle of both networks. According to Ericsson vice president of marketing for IP and broadband Don McCullough, the SSR can be used to run policy enforcement and deep packet inspection (DPI) for mobile, video, residential broadband and enterprise networks. It has 16 Tb/s of capacity and scale in all directions to handle increasing subscribers, signaling traffic and new applications.

McCullough said the way people are using mobile devices today, there’s very little difference in the services and applications coming over the fixed or mobile broadband access pipes. “You’re seeing more and more people reaching the broadband world through applications and services on the mobile network,” McCullough said. “You need to be a whole network.”

McCullough admits there’s a limit, at least in the foreseeable future, to how much convergence there can be between the wireline and wireless networks. We won’t see LTE serving gateways terminating home fiber connections any time soon, but both of those functions will be built on the same fundamental IP architecture. The same underlying platform will just be optimized for different purposes, he said.

The SSR will be the first of the new products in what Ericsson has termed its 4^th Generation Network portfolio, but it plans to release a variety of network elements throughout 2011, some designed for specific wireline or wireless functions, some intended to be network agnostic. It plans on launching a new mobile packet gateway to enable the mass adoption of IP version 6 and scale up for the explosion in signaling traffic produced by machine-to-machine networks. It’s developing a new high capacity serving gateway support node (SGSN) and mobility management element (MME) with the semi-dangerous sounding name Mark VIII. It’s building a multi-layer, multi-platform IP transport network management system as well as new backhaul and optical transport systems.