Product: Virtual Customer Premises Equipment Developers: Hugo Silverman, Yuri Gittik, Ron Insler, Yaakov Stein Company: RAD Start of Development: 2013
RAD was founded by brothers Yehuda and Zohar Zisapel in 1981 as a spinoff of Bynet, a company that distributed communications equipment. RAD’s first successful product was a miniature modem, a later version of which was recognized as the smallest modem in the world by the Guinness Book of Records of 1992.
The modems developed by RAD provide physical connectivity from a customer’s premises to the network’s resources that gradually progressed from the physical interface to increasingly sophisticated networking functionality. RAD developed a series of CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) devices for TDM networks, frame relay and ATM networks and finally, equipment for Ethernet and Internet networks. These devices have many network functionalities such as formatting user traffic to the network protocol; fault detection and repair of equipment failures; performance monitoring; and distribution of the traffic rate to avoid overwhelming network resources.
By the 21st century, Ethernet and IP dominated networking protocols, however advanced functionalities continued to proliferate, compelling communications service providers to upgrade their equipment at accelerating rates. Ultimately, service providers decided to adopt a new approach called Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), whereby networking functionalities would be implemented in software running on standard server platforms, rather than dedicated hardware purchased from vendors. This development could potentially accelerate adoption of new networking technologies, but also augur the end of the dedicated CPE era.
RAD realized that this approach suffered from two disadvantages: the performance reduction incurred by the distance between the networking functions center and the customer’s premises, and the lower efficiency stemming from the general-purpose servers’ unsuitability to executing networking tasks.
In 2013, RAD therefore proposed the radically new concept of Distributed NFV (DNVF) in which network equipment is replaced with software that can run anywhere in the network – even at the customer premises (vCPE). This concept exploits existing highly efficient hardware, improves user experience and strengthens communications security. The vCPE concept is today universally recognized as the most attractive NFV use case, and is instrumental in the evolution of edge computing.
RAD operates offices in 26 countries around the world. Since 1988, the company’s products have been manufactured in its state-of-the-art factory in Jerusalem. In 2014, RAD opened an advanced R&D center in Be’er Sheva, dedicated to developing NFV technologies.
