ITU: Juniper unveils Infranet Initiative

Juniper Networks chose the fitting setting of ITU Telecom World this week to call on fellow vendors and network operators throughout the industry and the world to cooperate to speed the migration to all-IP to ensure better quality, reliability and security for wireline and wireless Internet communications.

The company has named its call to action Infranet Initiative, for its outline document describing the shortcomings of the Internet requiring a single packet infrastructure spanning all networks and supporting all communications, said Kevin Dillon, director of portfolio marketing at Juniper Networks.

Juniper envisions that so-called infranets will be built individually by service providers, but will be interconnected to form a global "meta-network." Dillon said the technology already exists in large part to make this initiative a reality, but further industry agreement is required on standards.

"We don’t want to kick off a raft of new standards activity with this initiative, and we’re not looking to replace what standards bodies are already doing," Dillon said. "We want to take advantage of existing standards work and just get everybody to agree on what the common end point should be."

Dillion suggested that the Internet’s current structure leaves no way for carriers to identify premium traffic as it travels across different networks. There’s also no incentive for one carrier to treat another carrier’s premium traffic as such on its own network. "In fact, right now, it’s in the other carriers’ best interests not to do that," Dillon said. "The incentive to do otherwise is something that’s sorely needed. There should be service level agreements across different carriers’ networks."

According to Juniper, there are three fundamental aspects to delivering the assured performance of an infranet:

• The ability for a customer's chosen application to automatically request the level of security, quality and bandwidth it requires from the network.

• The network's ability to ensure delivery of services with the level of performance and security required by the customer's application.

• Selectively open connections between carrier networks that support and reward the delivery of advanced services, such as content distribution and virtual private networks, across the global public network, not just the carrier's own physical network.

• The Infranet Initiative also consists of a customer charter detailing what customers should be able to expect from the public network in the future, including assured levels of quality, security and bandwidth across the entire network.

  Juniper is not looking to be the leader or host of the initiative—it wants other companies to join the spirit of the Infranet Initiative and not to launch competing initiatives. One of the underlying notions of the Infranet Initiative is that carriers need to invest more money more quickly in packet networks, but Dillon said it’s not simply advertising for Juniper’s equipment.

  "As a whole, the industry is still most circuit-based. It needs to migrate, but there are challenges there, and some companies will move at a faster pace than others," Dillon said. "Carrier capex limitations are a concern, but we see are starting to see a larger share of that capex go to packet-based infrastructure."