MWC: Juniper takes on 4G without Ericsson

This year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR) showed the wireless industry there is life without Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) in the mobile packet core. For 4G, Ericsson has parted ways with Juniper, choosing to build its long-term evolution evolved packet core on its own Redback SmartEdge platform, rather than use Juniper routers. But Juniper unveiled its own 4G core solution this week, announcing software for its MX 3D Series routers that will not only take over the LTE gateway functions but also enhance its capabilities in the 3G core.

As part of its Project Falcon initiative announced in October, Juniper released a version of Junos operating system software that will transform it into the packet data node gateway (or P-Gateway) and serving gateway (or S-gateway) of an LTE core. Juniper is leaving the mobile management element (MME) to the radio access vendors, and leveraging its MX 3D’s mammoth routing capabilities to tackle the anticipated data deluge LTE will bring, said Mallik Tatipamula, head of Juniper’s wireline, wireless, fixed-mobile convergence and managed services segments.

The Ericsson-Juniper partnership for the 3G core combined Juniper’s IP routing expertise with Ericsson’s expertise in the mobile control plane. But after producing gateway GPRS support nodes (GGSNs) with Ericsson for eight years, Juniper has picked up a lot of expertise in mobility, aided by acquisitions and other partnerships along the way. For instance, Tatipamula said, Juniper helped Harris Stratex, now Aviat Networks (NASDAQ:AVNW), develop is new access service node (ASN) gateway for WiMax networks, using the same MX 3D platform. Tatipamula said Juniper believes it is now in the perfect position to make an impact as a wireless infrastructure in 4G as the industry decouples the core from the radio access network. Juniper has the added advantage of having its MX 3D routers already installed in strategic locations in many operators networks, making repurposing those routers for core functions all that much easier.

On the 3G side, Juniper’s partnership is still in place, and Ericsson said it has no plans yet to discontinue it. While Juniper doesn’t plan to challenge its own joint venture by offering its own GGSN, it is adding functions to the MX 3D designed to help carriers handle the mounting Internet traffic traversing their networks. The first solution, called Media Flow (no relation to Qualcomm’s (NASDAQ:QCOM) MediaFLO mobile TV technology) caches high-bandwidth video traffic in the operators network, moving it closer to the subscriber thus saving the operator on transport costs and easing overall congestion in the network. The second, called Traffic Direct, is a mobile data offload technology that intercepts Internet-bound traffic and directs it off the operators network, again easing congestion and saving transport cost.

The peculiar thing about both technologies though is they both sit behind the core network. The mobile data offload technologies being released by other vendors like Stoke and Tellabs (NASDAQ:TLAB) sit between the core and the radio access network, allowing the operator to dump Internet bound traffic before its ever sees a GGSN. Traffic Direct and Media FLO, however, sit behind the GGSN, respectively offloading and caching traffic before it reaches the operators services complex, the myriad array of IP proxies and billing servers that sit outside the core.

A good deal of Juniper’s routers sit in the transport network between the services complex, which makes them good candidates for the solutions, but Juniper also has a lot of MX 3D routers in the core itself and at aggregation points in the backhaul network. Tatipamula wouldn’t comment on whether Juniper had plans to move the caching and offload capabilities closer to the edge of the 3G network, but he said as networks evolve to LTE, those capabilities will migrate to the edge automatically if an operator used the MX 3D as an LTE core.

Unlike Stoke and Tellabs, Juniper may face an internal conflict in its development of offload capabilities. If it were to move offload in front of the core, it could have a direct impact on its Ericsson joint venture. Mobile data offload could take as much as 70% of IP traffic off of the mobile core, which would lead to far fewer GGSN sales.