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The packet core network is looking increasingly bleak as a battleground for Juniper as it fights to narrow the gap with Cisco. The company reportedly lost out to its larger arch-rival in the acquisition of core networking specialist Starent, and now it will lose its key core partnership, with Ericsson, at the LTE stage.

This is hardly a surprise, given that the Swedish giant acquired Redback three years to bolster its own IP networking expertise, but it still reduces Juniper's influence outside its important venture with Nokia Siemens (mainly for Carrier Ethernet and backhaul, but capable of extending further). Ericsson will maintain its existing partnership with Juniper for 2G and 3G core systems, but will build its LTE product on the Redback Smart Edge platform.

Redback was acquired to be the foundation for Ericsson's increasing IP activities and its bid to improve its position in converged wired/wireless networks. In some ways, it has been surprising how little the Swede has so far leveraged its new technology, but it clearly sees 4G as the right moment to make a clean architectural break in the core. However, according to Telephony, Ericsson CTO Håkan Eriksson says the firm will maintain a dual-line strategy for the foreseeable future - while it might eventually migrate its 3G core to SmartEdge, for now it will continue to build its 2G and 3G GGSN on Juniper routers, while producing an entirely inhouse solution for LTE's evolved packet core.

This project will also help to cement the new strength of Ericsson's US portfolio, as it has received significant input from Verizon Wireless. The carrier, which plans to be the first to deploy LTE commercially, will deploy the SmartEdge-based serving gateways (S-gateways) and packet data node gateways (or P-gateways) for the LTE core, Eriksson said. This highlights the complexity of the Verizon plan - Ericsson, along with Alcatel-Lucent, won the RAN deal for LTE, but most of the core network contract went to Starent, and must have been one of the attractions for Cisco.

A more unlikely player to be making strong early progress in the evolved packet core is Huawei, which is pushing its credentials way up the value chain in LTE. It has gained yet another boost from Vodafone, the company that first gave it the badge of respectability among European tier one carriers. The two giants have opened a new lab in Milan, Italy, devoted to R&D into the mobile core, with initial focus on IMS, mobile broadband support and fixed/mobile convergence. Vodafone does not play to deploy LTE until 2011 or 2012, but may award some initial contracts as early as a year from now. Its current core network suppliers are Ericsson, Starent and Nokia Siemens, but operators could well see the new architecture of IP-based 4G as a chance to try new suppliers or adopt a new approach where the core and RAN vendors are more separated (as Clearwire has done in its own WiMAX-based 4G roll-out, using the core platform from WiChorus, which is being acquired by Tellabs).

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