Juniper boosts broadband router capacity

Juniper Networks is boosting the capacity of its E320 broadband services router this month, keeping a promise made last year.

When Juniper unveiled the E320 at the Supercomm trade show in the summer of 2005, it featured a maximum switching capacity of 100 Gb/s that Juniper said would be upgradeable to 320 Gb/s when customers required it. This month, a new set of line cards will become generally available that raise the router’s total capacity to 320 Gb/s.

In June, Morgan Keegan analyst Simon Leopold suggested that the E320’s capacity gap was becoming a sore point in the relationship between Juniper and one of its biggest customers, Verizon Communications. Juniper denied the assertion, calling its relationship with Verizon “very strong.”

The new gigabit Ethernet and 10-GigE line cards out this month double the density of the E320’s previous cards, with 12 10-GigE ports per chassis and 192 GigE ports per chassis.

The new cards also include multicast features that allow carriers to push multicast replication out of the central office to the edge router, thereby distributing the work.

“You send the multicasting out as far to access side of the network as possible, so you’re not overburdening a centralized processing model with a high amount of replication,” said Tom DiMicelli, product manager for Juniper’s E-series broadband routers.

Juniper claims to have sold the E320 to nearly 30 customers.

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