Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC) is planning a higher-capacity SmartEdge router that will support 400 Gbit/s per slot, according to a report late yesterday from analyst Simon Leopold of Morgan Keegan & Company Inc.

Leopold's report is really a detailed look at Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR) and its market segments. The Ericsson mention was included in the section about the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) for mobile networks.

Why this matters
Ericsson's LTE evolved packet core is based on SmartEdge, which was acquired with Redback in 2007. A SmartEdge upgrade would help intensify the EPC competition, which will get a separate prod from Juniper when Project Falcon surfaces next year.

It's also the first major upgrade to SmartEdge in a while, and it would put the edge router on par with other vendors' claims. Cisco claimed early on that the ASR 9000 edge routers would eventually support 400 Gbit/s per slot, and Huawei says it will match that metric. Both say they'll do this without "double-counting" bandwidth; that is, each slot would accommodate four 100Gbit/s interfaces without oversubscription. (See Chipping Away at Cisco's ASR 9000, Cisco Pushes 160-Gig at Edge , Huawei's Big Router, and Huawei's Doing 100-Gig, Too.)

For more
Here's some recent coverage on EPCs and Project Falcon -- and, at the end, the stories about those acquisitions.

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading