Network World is reporting that Juniper is about to ship a pile of new low-ish end routers designed to compete with Cisco’s NM/WIC-based router lineup. They don’t have a ton of details, but there seem to be 3 models, the 2300 with two FE ports and two WAN ports, the 4300 with 6 WAN ports, and the 6300 with a faster processor and 6 WAN ports.

The quoted throughput rates are really low–the 2300 is only rated for 8 Mbps, which puts it in the same territory as an ancient Cisco 2500, which has less horsepower then most modern cell phones. Given that, I suspect that Network World is actually quoting VPN throughput. We’ll see next week.

Unless I missed something, this is Juniper’s first foray into this area of the market. It’ll be interesting to see how well they can compete, especially since Cisco is aggressively rolling VoIP and Ethernet switching abilities into the higher end of their competing products.