Juniper’s Next-Gen MX Routers Designed for 5G Wireless, IoT, SDN-WANs

The latest generation of Juniper’s networking gear will bring programmability and flexibility designed to handle the services that will come with such emerging technologies as 5G wireless and the internet of things. Juniper Network officials are putting greater programmability and flexibility into the latest generation of the company’s MX Series routers to address the unknowns that will invariably arise from 5G wireless, the internet of things, software-defined WAN services and other emerging network technologies. The new MX Series 5G Universal Routing Platform, introduced this week, includes Juniper’s new Penta Silicon chip for improved programmability, 5G Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS) software for hardware acceleration to drive performance and scalability, and the MX10008 and MX10016 Universal Chassis, which bring similar capabilities for the vendor’s PTX and QFX product lines. The enhancements are designed to give enterprises and service providers an agile platform to handle the handle what is coming from 5G networks and the internet of things (IoT), which will bring a lot of challenges that might not yet be apparent to many organizations at this point, according to Sally Bament, vice president of marketing at Juniper. They know that 5G will bring significantly greater speed and capacity to networks than 4G and that the IoT will include tens of billions of connected devices within a few years. “But just as important are the unknowns—and the key here lies in the ability to adapt to new services, new user expectations, new networking protocols and more,” Bament wrote in a post on the company blog. “Protecting against the unknowns means leveraging an adaptable, flexible and programmable routing platform,” adding that 5G, IoT and SD-WANwill lead to an array of new services.