Juniper aims for larger piece of wireless network upgrade pie

Juniper Networks on Monday will roll out three products for mobile network providers to get a bigger slice of the 3G, 4G and LTE upgrade revenue pie.

The big picture: Juniper, which primarily competes with Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco for wireless business, sees networks converging. According to Mallik Tatipamula, vice president of service provider marketing at Juniper, the mobile network will look a lot like the fixed line broadband infrastructure.

These so-called converged networks are growing in clout overseas and are likely to catch on in the U.S. in a few years.

With that in mind, Juniper is launching three products at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Monday:

• Juniper Traffic Direct: Traffic Direct is designed to manage data traffic from smartphones, netbooks and notebooks. The idea is to offload bulk data traffic to the Internet to ease wireless network congestion. Availability: Second quarter.
• Juniper Media Flow: This product operates as a content delivery network to deliver "a TV-like experience" on mobile devices. Media Flow uses software from Ankeena Networks to smooth out bit streaming for video. Availability: Second quarter.
• Juniper Mobile Core Evolution: The networking company is aiming to provide a secure packet to better monetize 3G and 4G services. Mobile Core Evolution will use Juniper's MX 3D routers and Junos software. The idea is to enable carriers to develop new revenue streams on a unified networks. Availability: Beta in the fourth quarter.

Juniper is a smaller fry in the land of vendors catering to wireless carriers. Indeed, AT&T on Wednesday went with Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson for its LTE upgrade. That said Juniper has routers in place at all the tier one carriers. Tatipamula said the company is hoping to grow share as networks converge behind the scenes.

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