Lucent beefs up family of routers

Lucent has beefed up its Access Point family of routers and IP software with three new consumer premises equipment-based products that focus on the small business customer base, including a range of services for VPNs.

Part of the third generation of IP service routers, the three new products let “our global business partners and our service provider partners deliver IP services to a wide range of locations directly from the premises,” said Brian Schulz, vice president of product planning and management in Lucent’s Access Point product group.

Schulz said the vendor was adding five flavors of lower-end products, a mid range product and was previewing a “high-end platform which will be available in June.”

“The key message is that with this portfolio of products we can now enable global business partners as well as service provider partners to quickly create a wide range of revenue-generating CPE-based IP service from a single multi-service delivery platform,” Schulz said.

Among the applications the Access Point products address are quality of service and bandwidth management in a platform that can be deployed on the customer premises and managed from a central NOC location.

They meet continuing demand from enterprises to make use of the IP infrastructure to both reduce delivery costs and leverage the network’s reach, said Schulz.

“It’s a very rich, very cost-effective means by which to deliver services,” he concluded.