Unisphere demonstrates interest in cable market

(Telephony) Although Unisphere Networks has a big product push planned for its ERX line of IP routers at next month’s SuperComm in Atlanta, it’s using this week’s Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) Cable Tec Expo in Orlando to flirt with the cable industry.

“Over the last 12 months, we’ve spent a lot of time building up our presence in the cable industry, because we believe that … it’s going to be a very big market for us,” said Unisphere’s marketing director Karen Livoli. “[Cable] is a market that we really want to penetrate this year.”

This week offers a taste of the things Unisphere’s ERX products can do, Livoli said.

“We are an edge router,” she said. “There’s a category in the industry of edge routers, 95% of which don’t actually route. I would say our first claim to fame on the ERX side is we are a true carrier-class router.”

This allows service providers to handle next generation services like voice, video, virtual private networks--“all these services that require consistent and high levels of performance from your network,” Livoli said.

On top of that, Unisphere will add “all the bells and whistles,” like multiprotocol layered switching (MPLS), IP quality of service (QoS), multicasting and virtual LANs (VLANs), she said.

The company also will offer an integrated dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) server to streamline IP address management and “policies that go right down to the subscriber level. You can set up your user profile and you can customize them by customer,” Livoli said.

“Those two specific features and the wire-speed QoS are the things that are getting us in and differentiating us right now,” she said. “Obviously, cable operators are in a pretty heavy turf battle with DSL providers right now. What they really need to do is streamline. We have a very good product for streamlining their cap ex costs.”

Livoli said Unisphere has been in alpha and beta trials with unnamed cable operators since October and “we’ve definitely enhanced our product to make it a better fit into the cable market. We’re trying to stake a claim into the cable market.”