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JUNIPER OUTLINES VISION FOR PUBLIC NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE

In a document released Wednesday, Juniper Networks, Inc. outlined its vision for a new approach to public network infrastructure that addresses the problems inherent in today's Internet. Called the Infranet Initiative, the document describes a public network that combines the ubiquitous connectivity of the Internet with the assured performance and security of a private network. The new network, or Infranet, is designed to unlock true multimedia person-to-person communication, facilitate the trend towards machine-to- machine applications such as grid computing, enable businesses and governments to reap the full benefits of Web-enabled operations, and provide the level of performance and security vital to the future growth of the online economy.

An infranet is neither the public Internet nor a private network infrastructure. The company envisions that infranets will be built individually by service providers, but will be interconnected to form a global 'meta-network.' Infranets will give each user his own unique slice of a secure public infrastructure and will enable users to select and be billed for the network experience appropriate for the application. Infranets will provide the underlying facility for the extended enterprise and for business and consumer applications such as utility computing, Web services, online gaming, rich content delivery and real-time interactive services.

"The Internet has changed all our lives, but falls short of the requirements for a unified networking infrastructure and the assured delivery of important services and applications," said Scott Kriens, chairman and chief executive officer, Juniper Networks. "The technical and economic challenges of today's communications problems require an enhanced public packet network -- an infranet -- a superset of the original Internet. This model, outlined in the Infranet Initiative, describes physically shared and virtually dedicated networks that will be built with industry collaboration.

The technology already exists in large part to make this vision a reality. What is missing is broad agreement on common goals and industry collaboration to make it happen. That's why we created the Infranet Initiative, and we call upon the industry to support it."

Customer Charter

The Infranet Initiative also lays out a charter detailing what customers should be able to expect from the public network in the future. This includes: the ability to entrust mission-critical and personal information to the network; appropriate and assured levels of quality, security and bandwidth across the entire network; and access to high quality, next-generation multimedia communications services.

Industry Call to Action

There are three fundamental aspects to delivering the assured performance of an infranet:

• The ability for a customer's chosen application to automatically request the level of security, quality and bandwidth it requires from the network.
• The network's ability to ensure delivery of services with the level of performance and security required by the customer's application.
• Selectively open connections between carrier networks that support and reward the delivery of advanced services, such as content distribution and virtual private networks, across the global public network, not just the carrier's own physical network.

The Infranet Initiative calls upon the industry to work towards realizing these fundamental building blocks of an infranet, and, in particular, to enable inter-carrier connections by developing the necessary specifications and sponsoring them before the appropriate standards bodies.

The Infranet Initiative document can be found at: http://www.juniper.net/solutions/literature/infranet_initiative.pdf.