Routers World

Alcatel-Lucent this week unveiled additions to its service router portfolio intended to address the requirements of smaller carriers and the remote points of presence of larger ones.

Cool new products of the week

The company rolled out two scaled-down versions of its 7750 Services Router for delivering mobile, residential and business services in smaller communities and verticals such as utilities, transportation, healthcare, public safety, and financial institutions.

Alcatel-Lucent is charting a course to the next generation of carrier routers with new silicon that is focused today on delivering services from the edge of a network but could also power a massive packet engine for the core.

The company’s FP3 chip, the latest in a series of packet-processing chips from the rising router vendor, can route traffic at 400G bps (bits per second) while meeting the special needs of many kinds of services. From its Tuesday launch, it will leap ahead of the fastest silicon from Alcatel’s rivals and is expected to power a core router to take on Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks in the near future.

Brocade has launched Brocade Network Advisor, a converged management platform for both storage area network and IP networks, and a high-density 100Gb Ethernet router, as part of its overall data center strategy.

The products, unveiled on Wednesday, are part of the networking specialist’s Brocade One strategy, which seeks to simplify the architecture of the modern data center. It competes with data center packages offered by other major hardware companies, such as Cisco’s Unified Computing System and Juniper Networks’s Project Status.

“Brocade Network Advisor (BNA) helps reduce customer operational expenditure by minimizing training, increasing automation and consolidating tools,” Jason Nolet, vice president of the company’s data center and enterprise networking group, said in a statement.

Read more of “Brocade launches management tools and 100GbE router” at ZDNet UK.

One of the major problems most users face with routers is that of the first initial step, i.e. the configuration of the routers. From Belkin router configuration to Netgear router setup, the average common router user cannot completely facilitate the process. What is required is the help of computer experts that is available at your beck and call, every hour of the day, each single day of the year. This is not possible with the regular tech support companies that provide you with on-site support. The role of perennial computer support is fulfilled by online technical support companies.

Windows: Remember Microsoft Virtual Wi-Fi plans for Windows 7? Although the project is officially dead, but the source code is available, and without the application Maryfi takes advantage of this to offer a software router that can share a single Wi-Fi portion, such as those used in airports, hotels, etc

Edit-we received news that Maryfi used many of the copyrighted logos and text Connectify, a similar service that we’ve covered in the past. Readers are advised to exercise caution when using the software from sources that the reuse of copyrighted material and encourage you to look also at Connectify.