Doubts over regulations are making life difficult for telecoms and Internet-service operators in the mainland, but overseas telecoms-equipment makers would have a hard time imagining a better place to sell their wares. The government has given the go-ahead for three up-and-coming networks - Jitong, China Unicom and China Netcom - to build national, high-speed networks to challenge that of incumbent China Telecom. In addition, provincial telecoms agencies are making their own multi-million-dollar decisions on equipment, while semi-independent organisations, academic and industry-specific, are setting up links to the mainland's networks and to the outside world. No wonder all the large players in networking, among them Lucent Technologies, Cisco Systems and Northern Telecom, are in the mainland, often with sales operations there and regional headquarters in Hong Kong. Last week, they were joined by newcomer Juniper Networks, which set up its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Hong Kong and announced agreements with 17 resellers of its networking hardware. Unprofitable Juniper made its debut on Nasdaq earlier this year, earning a market valuation of US$10 billion. It now has a market capitalisation of more than $14 billion. Juniper is challenging Cisco in the area of high-end Internet backbone routers. These sell for hundreds of thousands of US dollars and speed data packets from one point to another on the global networks. According to Charles Will, Juniper's general manager for Asia-Pacific, most Internet service providers that buy from Juniper use a combination of Juniper and Cisco equipment. Other makers of high-end routers include Lucent unit Nexabit. Juniper's M40 has done well since it started shipping about one year ago, racking up sales of $61 million in the past four quarters. That is peanuts compared to Cisco's overall sales - more than $3.8 billion in the last quarter - but it does show that Juniper has a chance of taking a slice of one of the giant's most lucrative markets. The present generation of asynchronous transfer mode switches mostly moves data at speeds measured in hundreds of megabits. Juniper claims its M40 can move data at a speed of 40 gigabits per second (gbps). Cisco's GSR 12012 claims speeds of 60 gbps and Lucent's MX64000 advertises rates of 6.4 terabits per second. For all three, the mainland represents a market that will grow by at least 50 per cent annually, as the newer networks are told to 'ignore the legacy infrastructure' and to use the latest equipment, said Juniper's Mr Will. He and other company executives said that though Juniper sells about 3 per cent of its equipment on the mainland - compared with about 65 per cent in the US - the company expects the mainland to quickly become one of its bigger markets, perhaps equal to a 10th of all sales. NETWORKING