San Jose, Calif. -- A router design that promises to change the way traffic is handled on the Internet has been announced by the Internet pioneer Lawrence Roberts. People familiar with the new Flow Router said Roberts' system is a novel and promising approach to a well-known problem, but his startup, Anagran Inc. (Redwood City, Calif.), faces hurdles gaining market traction for it.

Today's routers generally handle traffic as individual packets of data. Many add-on systems are emerging that try to understand and manage larger groups of related packets, called flows, that could be part of the same voice call or video stream.

Routing traffic at the level of flows is the right approach for today's Net, where video and voice are becoming increasingly important, said Roberts, who led the design of a government packet network that became the basis for the Internet.

"We would have liked to manage traffic as flows from the beginning because it is only natural to treat video, images and voice calls as one object, but we didn't have enough memory or processing power," said Roberts, who also wrote one of the first e-mail applications. "Now memory is cheap as mud."

Roberts tried a similar approach with Caspian Networks, a startup he left in 2004 that closed its doors in 2006 after having raised a whopping $300 million in venture capital. Caspian had the right idea but came a little early and hit the tech downturn hard, Roberts said.

"The economics of this idea were just starting to come into being, but the system at that time was 10 times the cost and size of what we built today, so Caspian went out of business because they didn't have enough profit margin," Roberts said.

Anagran's FR-1000 costs $70,000, about a third the price of traditional routers, yet promises utilization rates as high as 95 percent compared with rates as low as 25 percent for some packet routers. "You can get a significant performance increase by just dropping these into existing networks," he said.

In addition, the FR-1000 fits into a 1U slice of a standard 19-inch rack, compared with traditional devices as big as 13U. It dissipates 300 W, compared with as much as 4,000 W for some packet routers.

"This really is the router of the future," Roberts said.

The International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University has been testing the Anagran system for several months. The center's director, Joe Mambretti, said, "It's a very promising technology and has significant potential, addressing a number of issues in a way no one else is today."

The center expects to release final results in November. If the system proves itself, the center could purchase some of the devices for use in two large Internet service centers it manages.

Flow control and other concepts such as Layer-2 routing will become adjuncts to traditional packet routers, said Mambretti. "The general trend is moving from a one-size-fits-all approach to routing to a world where you have different techniques to handle undifferentiated and deterministic traffic," he said.

David Vorhaus, a research associate at the Yankee Group briefed by the startup, said, "The Anagran concept is one all service providers are interested in--injecting more intelligence into the network. The question is whether this is the best way to do it."

Vorhaus noted that major router makers such as Juniper Networks are working with companies that make standalone systems that plug into a network to handle some of the flow control work.