Telecommunications provider Alcatel-Lucent has unveiled a new core routing product and is officially making its entry into the $4 billion market for Internet core routers. The new platform, the 7950 Extensible Routing System (XRS), is based on the company’s 400Gbps FP3 processor and is optimized for video and the cloud. Buyers in the core router market will likely welcome the new options, but Cisco and Juniper – maybe not so much.

An Expanding Alcatel-Lucent Portfolio

Alcatel-Lucent has been selling routers for over a decade; 24 percent of the market uses the company’s edge router offerings. However, the company has stayed out of the core router market since the four products it introduced over a decade ago failed to gain adoption. It seems that Alcatel-Lucent is ready to take another shot and Cisco and Juniper should be concerned.

Alcatel-Lucent’s new offering can scale from 6.4Tbps to 32Tbs and can support 160 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a single system. This is five times the density of existing core routers. The XRS also uses over 66 percent less energy than most core routers on the market, which is a big win for customers.

The new routing platform is available in three configurations : the entry level XRC-16c with 6.4Tbps of capacity, a mid-range XRS-20 that supports 16Tbps capacity and the high-end XRS-40 with 32Tbps capacity. Although the products are not yet available, Alcatal-Lucent says the new  platform is the equivalent of 10 to 12 current routers linked together.

Routers aren’t the only thing Alcatel-Lucent is adding to its portfolio of offerings. This week, the company also introduced its new Managed Service Quality and Assurance service. The new offering is based on Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive software, which was released in February to detect, isolate and help resolve issues. The Managed Service Quality and Assurance helps mobile providers improve the performance of their service by looking for issues that could result in dropped calls or poor connectivity and warns operators before users are impacted. The new service also allows mobile providers to trace issues all the way to users’ mobile devices without installing any software on the users’ devices.

Alcatel-Lucent’s entry into the market will likely prompt Juniper and Cisco to quickly release new services and offerings in hopes it will shield them from losing customers to Alcatel-Lucent. Juniper has already announced increased capacity for its TXP multichassis interconnect from 6.4Tbps to 16Tbpps. Multichassis interconnects allow companies to connect multiple routers to increase capacity. Cisco and Juniper are currently well entrenched, but that doesn’t guarantee their continued success. Many customers are looking for alternatives that allow them to better support constantly growing volumes of data.