Adtran Attacks on Price

Adtran Inc. (Nasdaq: ADTN) will be debuting its latest piece of low-cost network equipment at NetWorld + Interop in Las Vegas this week.

The 5305 is the company's highest-end router, supporting a T3s worth of bandwidth and offering up to 2,000 IPSec tunnels. The platform offers six interface slots and two 10/100Base-T Ethernet Lan ports. It can also support Frame Relay and the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) for WANs.

Adtran is putting the 5305 up against the 3745 router from Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), which also offers up to 2,000 tunnels. However, Adtran believes that the 5305 will win customers on two fronts: security and cost.

Unlike the 3745, the 5305 ships with a firewall as standard -- and it's significantly cheaper. The Adtran 5305’s list price is $8,890, compared to $12,000 for the Cisco 3745.

Todd Lattanzi, product manager for Adtran’s NetVanta routers, says, "It’s substantial cost savings to the customer.”Cisco declined to comment on the 5305, which is aimed at companies that need to deploy a router in large branch sites or a regional hub.

Adtran’s launch fills out the higher end of the company’s portfolio of NetVanta switches and routers at a time when users’ networks are becoming increasingly bandwidth-hungry. “It spawned from requests from our customers who wanted more bandwidth,” says Lattanzi.

Adtran has already earned a reputation in the industry for driving price points down. Last month the company launched its 1224 range of all-in-one network products, designed to slash the cost of using separate switches and routers (see Adtran Offers a Combo).

Allied Telesyn Inc., another company with a reputation for shipping low-cost routers, will be launching products with specs similar to the NetVanta 5305 in July and August. However, a spokesman for the company was unable to reveal their list prices.

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum0