Software routing pioneer separates control and user planes across multiple systems to minimize network outages

FREMONT, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–RtBrick today announced it has added high availability capabilities to its routing software to help re-establish network services with only minimal disruption. Broadband access is a critical resource, and it has become increasingly important to protect users from a fiber break or a hardware failure in the access network. The company’s new capabilities add greater redundancy into networks to overcome these challenges and minimize the impact of the most severe network outages.

RtBrick’s software provides the Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) – the router that delivers internet services at the edge of a telco network – and is deployed on open hardware. In the event of a failure in the optical access network or a BNG hardware failure, which could affect tens of thousands of subscribers, services can now be re-established in a few seconds.

RtBrick’s software operates the control plane of both the primary BNG and a fully independent secondary BNG, maintaining it in a permanent state of readiness should there be a failure. The redundant system can be remotely located and used in a one-to-one configuration.

“In essence, this follows a distributed Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS) approach,” explains Hannes Gredler, CTO and Founder at RtBrick. “We have a distributed control plane located on individual switches, which is highly resilient and has no central point of failure, and then we allow it to control adjacent systems to create an extra layer of resilience.”

The redundant BNG shares state with the original, along with a live copy of routes, shapers, counters, and other subscriber information, enabling it to take over nearly instantaneously.

“We can do this partly as a result of our ability to rewrite routes faster than conventional systems,” added Gredler, “and partly because we can distribute and separate the control and user planes across multiple physical switches.”

RtBrick’s BNG software has already been deployed in Deutsche Telekom’s production broadband network and was recently selected by the TIP OpenBNG initiative, against criteria defined by five tier-1 carriers: BT, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, Telecom Italia Mobile and Vodafone.

To learn more about RtBrick’s pioneering approach to networking and the latest features of its open routing software, visit rtbrick.com.

About RtBrick

RtBrick has pioneered carrier routing software that runs on off-the-shelf hardware. It has applied the same approach to networks that the huge ‘cloud-natives’ have used to build and operate their web-scale IT services. RtBrick is a privately held company, incorporated in the USA, with staff located in Europe and India.

The information was submitted for publication at 10:00 CET on DECEMBER 13, 2022

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