Juniper to Show Mobile Bandwidth Management

Juniper Networks plans to formally roll out at the Mobile World Congress conference next week its strategy for helping Internet service providers deal with increasing volumes of data traffic.

Project Falcon, which Juniper previewed last fall, is designed to leverage Juniper’s new MX 3D series routers to improve the end-user experience on mobile networks.

The first iteration of Project Falcon comes in the form of Juniper Traffic Direct, which allows carriers to apply policies to specific end users that will route their traffic directly to the Internet versus requiring it be processed by the internal network of the carrier. According to Wendy Cartee, vice president of marketing for the Edge and Aggregation Unit of Juniper, this feature will not only enable operators to identify traffic that they are just passing through to another carrier, but also identify streaming video traffic that they may not need to process at all.

The second offering is called Juniper Media Flow, which is designed to optimize the flow of multimedia traffic across a carrier network, while a third offering, called Juniper Mobile Core Evolution, is designed to allow carriers to support 3G, 4G and LTE traffic on the same network. This is critical, says Cartee, because most ISPs can’t afford to deploy separate infrastructure for different classes of wireless networks.

In general, providers of network infrastructure are making significant strides in terms of both available bandwidth and how traffic is managed across those networks. Whether those advances can keep pace with skyrocketing demands for mobile computing usage remains to be seen. But which service providers survive in the coming years will be directly related to the investments they make in intelligent infrastructure today.