IP infrastructure company Juniper Networks Tuesday says it has reached an agreement to help Reston, Va.-based XO Communications a hand with its backbone.

As part of the deal, Sunnyvale Calif.-based Juniper will be supplying its M-series Internet routers in its new nationwide OC-192 inter-city network. The M160 and M40 Internet routers can reach 10 Gigabits per second speeds.

The network infrastructure is expected to provide inter-city Internet and integrated voice and data services to business customers across 63 U.S. XO markets.

"The growing enterprise business XO customer base is clamoring for a variety of services, including toll-quality voice over a single IP backbone," says XO senior VP and CTO Doug Carter. "The decision to upgrade from legacy platforms to Juniper Networks M-series Internet routers was based on their reliability, scalability and performance. Combined with JUNOS Internet software features and the Internet Processor II ASIC, Juniper Networks Internet routers will provide XO the capability to offer new smart IP services including MPLS VPNs and voice over IP."

So far, Juniper's M160 Internet routers have been installed in XO's IP backbone "core-node" points of presence in eight cities: New York, Washington, D.C., Denver, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and San Jose.

The plan now is to mount Juniper M40 Internet routers to direct and manage network traffic generated from XO metro fiber rings in the 63 other markets into the eight core cities.

Using the M-series routers is also expected to let XO migrate traffic from its legacy network to a new single IP infrastructure, eliminating the need for separate voice, IP and leased-line networks.

XO says all of its metro markets will eventually be connected via dual OC-12 capacity circuits.

LATEST NEWS

Microsoft's Dynamics ERP to Gain New Services
Barnes & Noble's e-Reader Nook Sold Out Already
Memory Market Due for Big Shift in 2010
Microsoft: No 'Back Door' in Windows 7
Tech's H-1B Hiring Faces 'Employ America Act'