Redback turbo charges gateway, gets in on video game

Redback Networks today announced the latest version of its SmartEdge Service Gateway platform, marking a significant performance jump for the product and positioning it to be a part of the burgeoning telco video market.

The new version provides up to four times the throughput of previous SmartEdges by incorporating a new Broadband IP Engine processing chip powering. That set allowed the company to incorporate 10 gigabit Ethernet and 10- and 20-port gigabit Ethernet I/O cards, which blend Ethernet aggregation with IP routing, and subscriber and session management. With the new cards, carriers can offer a large number of separate virtual LANs (VLANs) for business customers.

“Everyone else in this industry would have to launch a completely new product,” said Marco Wanders, chief marketing officer of Redback. “Our customers can still use the same chassis and processors. And this is not the end of the line. Our objective remains to consolidate the network for voice, video and data.”

Speaking to the video end of the market, the platform is also now incorporating multicasting support and reliability, which will allow the SmartEdge to ensure that all multicast video traffic can seamlessly fail over to a redundant card without interruption.

The release of the new platform follows a series of announcements from Redback that put it right in the middle of the telco video world. In April, the company said the SmartEdge 400 and 800 products had received listing on the USDA Rural Utilities Service listing, which allows independent telcos to apply for low-cost loans to buy gear. And in January, the company announced that Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan would use the gateway as part of one of the world’s largest IPTV deployments

Among larger U.S. carriers, the company is likely to tout its ability to offer what it believes is true carrier-class reliability, quality of service (QoS) and management in an Ethernet/IP environment.

“In the ATM days, you could control the QoS on a subscriber basis, but IP is a connectionless technology,” Wanders said. “[The new SmartEdge] is almost like brining the benefits of ATM together with Ethernet. We believe Ethernet is the future, we also believe you should not forget what’s out there today.”