RtBrick Breaks Speed Barrier for Internet Route Convergence

This article was published in Telecoms News on November 17, 2022. You can read the original article here

RtBrick today announced it has delivered the fastest route convergence times in the world, outpacing the speeds currently delivered by traditional systems. It has achieved this on open disaggregated hardware, rather than a legacy monolithic routing system.

With the upsurge in remote work, video-conferencing and streaming services, internet users have never been more reliant on uninterrupted service, and less forgiving of even the shortest outages. The internet is built from routers connected by more than a million paths, which are shared using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). If one of these routers fails or loses connectivity, full service isn’t restored until the router has re-learned the entire topology of the network – a process referred to as route convergence.

RtBrick’s software can now re-learn and load the entire internet feed of a million routes in less than thirty seconds, at a rate of forty thousand updates per second. This surpasses greatest speeds achieved by traditional systems.“

We’ve now reached the point where disaggregated networks can not only deliver more choice and lower costs for carriers, but they can also outperform even the fastest traditional routers,” said Hannes Gredler, founder and chief technology officer at RtBrick. 

“We previously demonstrated that delivering route convergence on a disaggregated network was at least equal in speed to that of older generations of routers. By optimising our software to take advantage of modern silicon capabilities, such as multi-threading, we are now surpassing them.”

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.