Lucent Technologies Inc. last week refreshed its line of access routers with three offerings intended to let service providers deliver customer premises equipment-based IP services.
The new Access Point IP services routers, the AP 300, 600 and 1500, are designed to let service providers supply enterprise customers in small offices, branch offices or regional headquarters with services ranging from basic Internet access to VPNs, firewall security and bandwidth management.
The new routers will replace the AP 450 and 1000, which have reached end-of-sale status, Lucent says. They are priced up to US$6,800 less than comparable Cisco routers, Lucent claims.
The Access Point 300 is available in five fixed configurations, none of which are field-upgradeable. They feature IP forwarding rates of 50Mbps, IP packet routing performance of 40,000 packet/sec, Triple-DES forwarding rates of 5Mbps, and 150 to 500 IPSec site-to-site and remote access VPN tunnels. They also support up to 400 Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) tunnels.
The Access Point 600 features IP forwarding rates of 220Mbps, IP packet routing of 148,000 packet/sec, Triple-DES encryption rates of 90Mbps and 600 to 3,500 IPSec site-to-site and remote access VPN tunnels. It also supports 1,200 L2TP tunnels.
The Access Point 1500 features IP forwarding rates of 700Mbps, 275,000 packet/sec of IP routing, Triple-DES encryption rates of 155Mbps and 1,000 to 5,000 IPSec site-to-site and remote access VPN tunnels. It also supports 3,500 L2TP tunnels.
All routers sport 10/100Mbps Ethernet LAN interfaces and a range of WAN interfaces, including T-1/E-1 and ISDN.
The new routers support four software packages, also unveiled last week, that let service providers tailor applications to specific IP services’ needs.
In addition to basic Internet access and routing services, the Base Package software supports managed bandwidth with integrated quality of service (QoS), firewall security, and IP management, Lucent says. The Advanced Networking Package includes everything in the Base Package as well as advanced routing, mobility and Layer 2 tunneling capabilities.
Other packages include the QVPN for IPSec VPN implementation and an “all-encompassing” IP Services package.
Lucent is targeting an exploding market with the Access Point routers. According to Infonetics Research, worldwide end-user expenditures for managed and unmanaged VPN services are expected to grow 283 per cent, from US$10.7 billion today to US$41 billion in 2005.
The new Access Point routers work with Lucent’s Access Point QVPN Builder, a centralized IP VPN, QoS and firewall policy manager for deploying, managing and scaling site-to-site VPNs and other IP services.
The Access Point 300 line is available. The routers are priced from US$3,500 to US$8,000.
The Access Point 600, available now, is priced from US$9,600 to US$29,000, and the Access Point 1500, available in June, is priced from US$12,000 to US$55,000.
Lucent can be reached at http://www.lucent.com.