'Data tsunami' brings wave of optimism

by **hlk** Wed 31 Aug 2011, 12:33

KUALA LUMPUR: Juniper Networks Inc, the second largest maker of Internet networking equipment in the world, is confident that sales in Malaysia and Southeast Asia would grow by double-digit percentage, thanks mainly to its new range for mobile operators to cope with the potential "data tsunami".

According to Ken Lim, Juniper's operating area leader responsible for the service providers market in Southeast Asia, the company grew by double digits last year, and expects this trend to continue this year.

Growth will be partly driven by its new product, MobileNext, a product comprising both hardware and solutions to help service providers to handle the surge in data usage launched early this year.

"We are seeing the trend of increasing data usage by end users. The data tsunami is like waves coming up and a lot of operators are not ready for this. They do not have a data centric network," said Lim in a Business Times interview recently.

To cope with this data tsunami, mobile operators would need to redesign their network, as their previous network is built to mainly handle voice traffic and not so much of data traffic.

"If you look at the mobile network, over 50 per cent mobile traffic today comes from smart phones, and it is congesting into the network. The legacy mobile network is designed for voice and a little bit of data, but the data traffic is taken over. You need complete architecture transition, rearchitecting the network," said Lim.

Even though most of the mobile operators saw the trend few years ago, and have been upgrading their network since, Lim said most of the operators are still having problems switching their traditional "legacy network" into the all-new Internet protocol (IP)-based network.

"They need a lot of integration, interoperability with their old system, the billing, has to work. That's where I think they are facing challenge. When they want to go all IP, they do a IP transformation, but they found out that they still need the legacy services. Juniper is in the space being able to address all these legacy migration, from 3G to Long Term Evolution (LTE), by having this MobileNext architecture. Our solutions is prepared for the very worst scale of data tsunami," said Lim.