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Cisco and Juniper are in a race to get their upgraded core routers to market first in 2011, but in the meantime both have new mobile core offerings to show off next week in Barcelona.

Cisco has brought a measure of integration to its Starent acquisition, repackaging the smaller firm's flagship product, ST40, with its own Unified Reporting System platform, and renaming it the ASR 5000. The combination allows the mobile data core to share

This is just the first step in a progam to upgrade the Starent platform and integrate it completely into Cisco's next generation network architecture for fixed and mobile IP systems.

"We're taking all of the Starent assets and combining them with all of Cisco's assets, making it a case of 1+1=3 ," Kittur Nagesh, director of service provider marketing, told Connected Planet. The Starent products will replace parts of Cisco's own core range, mainly in the PDSN and GGSN areas, as well being the basis of the LTE core architecture. Starent was already a key core network supplier for Verizon's LTE roll-out, one of the attractions for Cisco, which paid $2.9bn for the company.

Meanwhile, Cisco's arch-rival in carrier routers, Juniper Networks, has introduced three products geared to 4G and rich mobile media, as part of its Project Falcon mobile data initiative, originally announced a few months ago. The project focuses on creating products for the mobile packet core and 4G subscriber management, as well as 'universal edge' applications integrating wireline and wireless IP.

The new Juniper offerings are Traffic Direct, Media Flow and Mobile Core Evolution. The first combines subscriber and application policy software with Juniper's new MX 3D Ethernet edge routers, offloading a large amount of data traffic directly to the internet before it burdens the wireless network.

Media Flow, actually a partner product from Ankeena Networks, is designed to optimize mobile and fixed networks for efficient video and multimedia delivery to mobile devices. It enables adaptive bit streaming for video viewing, and will work with the Juniper VXA Series content delivery engine to provide video streaming up to 10Gbps per engine.

Mobile Core Evolution supports 3G and 4G services on the same network. It will not go into beta release until late this year, and will be based on MX 3D and Junos software, giving Juniper a serious response to the Cisco/Starent combination and the ASR 5000.

Cisco's latest Visual Networking Index predicts that, by 2014, mobile data traffic will reach 3.6 exabytes per month globally, or an annual run rate of 40 exabytes. This is a 39fold increase from 2009 to 2014, or a CAGR of 108%. Today, the average mobile broadband connection generates 1.3Gb of traffic per month. By 2014 this figure will rise to 7Gb. The growth rate is 2.4 times higher than for fixed broadband data traffic. And Cisco says that, by that date, there will be more than five billion personal devices connecting to mobile networks, as well as billions of machine-to-machine devices. Video will represent 66% of all mobile data traffic by 2014, up 66-fold from 2009.

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