"We’re showing the carrier network industry that innovation is not dead”, says Richard Brandon, VP of Marketing at RtBrick

This article was published in Vanilla Plus on August 4, 2021. You can read the original article here  

Chances are that you’ve already heard of RtBrick. Whether you’ve seen us on the front pages of telecom trade magazines, on shortlists for the industry’s most prestigious awards, or our CEO Pravin S Bhandarkar named among the top 100 most prominent people in the carrier community, we’re the latest company to watch.

Our pioneering carrier routing software is making waves. Most recently, we’ve partnered with Deutsche Telekom to deliver Internet connectivity speeds of up to 1000Mbps. Not a bad feat by any standards!

So, how does our tech work? Well, unlike traditional network equipment, our architecture uses a ‘disaggregated’ system, which in layman’s terms means that the network software is independent from its underlying hardware. For many years, the only way to deliver the levels of throughput required by the Internet was to build monolithic routing systems using custom silicon and optimise software around these. Instead, RtBrick has used a ‘cloud-native’ approach, with software running on off-the-shelf, low-cost hardware. This enables our partners to run their networks with the same approach that the huge ‘cloud-natives’ like Facebook, Amazon and Google used to build their IT services.

Sound interesting? To give you a better flavour of what we do, here’s some of our latest product and partnership news.

RtBrick and UfiSpace partner to deliver disaggregated routing solutions.

Today we announced a new partnership with UfiSpace to help develop telco routing solutions, starting with a high-scale Open BNG. This will see us porting our cloud-native Open BNG software onto UfiSpace’s aggregation router hardware to enable a spine-leaf architecture for building highly scalable broadband networks.

On our side, we offer IP/MPLS routing at carrier-scale, but use a cloud-native approach, with the software delivered as a container running microservices on a Linux operating system. UfiSpace, on the other hand, will make its open aggregation routers available to operators to run RtBrick’s software. These are equipped with large built-in TCAMs that enable two million plus table sizes and support SyncE and PTP IEEE 1588v2 timing.

Ultimately, the partnership will provide an open solution for carriers, offering choice and flexibility to those looking for a more flexible network infrastructure. Read more about the announcement here.

RtBrick delivers a fourfold increase in broadband performance by adding new open hardware support

We’ve also recently announced that our pioneering IP/MPLS routing software has been validated on the latest generation of open hardware platforms running on a new chipset from Broadcom, known as Q2C. These high-performance bare metal switches take telcos into a new era of flexibility and scale for both their networking hardware and software. When used as a BNG, these new platforms can typically support around 16,000 subscribers on each switch, with 2.4Tbps of throughput – around four times more than existing bare metal switches. The switches can then be scaled in a spine-leaf architecture to build massive broadband networks more quickly and cheaply than traditional routing systems.To read the full announcement, click here.

RtBrick software sets a new benchmark for Internet routing recovery.

And we’re not there yet. We’ve also set a new benchmark in Internet routing, delivering route convergence on a disaggregated network that’s at least as fast as anything seen on traditional proprietary systems.

Until now, proprietary routing systems have been required by most telcos and Internet Service Providers, since these can learn the routes used in today’s Internet in around one minute. Now, RtBrick’s software has shown that it can learn the Internet routing table and program it into off-the-shelf open hardware in just 46 seconds, with further performance increases expected over time. RtBrick has enhanced its routing software by taking full advantage of modern CPU features, as well as implementing load-balancing. This dramatically increases the speed of the convergence process while still using merchant silicon. In short, this means more features, faster times and more capacity. You can read the latest news on this here.

One thing’s clear, with RtBrick on the scene, innovation within the telco industry is not dead. Watch this space for further announcements coming soon!