Service provider networks are undergoing unprecedented transformations and increasing challenges. Dynamic business needs dictate ongoing and increasing network and IT investments. You need a solution that solves today's problems and can evolve to take advantage of tomorrow's opportunites.

Soapstone Networks™ Provider Network Controller™ (PNC) hides the complexity, technology and structure of transport networks to provide customers with maximum flexibility and adaptability in managing their networks. By creating a common control framework for various network technologies, the Soapstone PNC enables carriers to create and deploy services quickly by making services network technology agnostic. Based on a modular Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the Soapstone Networks product can easily be shaped to provide efficiencies in the varied applications you have in your environment.

Soapstone Networks represents a natural evolution of a maturing routing market and separates the control plane from the data plane in a router or switch and moves the network control plane closer to the services control plane. Avici learned through experience that when building a large scalable router, the majority of the cost resides in the data plane, while complex features reside in the control plane. Separating the two and moving the control plane from equipment to software allows natural value optimization to occur. Data plane vendors such as Ethernet switch suppliers can work to drive down the unit cost and add new features. Control plane vendors will focus on services and feature velocity. By making the coupling between network elements looser, interoperability problems are minimized and carriers can optimize their networks around the best building block technologies in a multi-vendor environment. The Soapstone control plane will exist outside the traditional router and could easily control an Ethernet, optical or routed network. Soapstone Networks leverages Avici's worldwide experience in building carrier-grade routing and is applying it to the industry's first product that bridges IT-centric domains of NGN and network centric domains of transport and access.