The field of multiservice edge devices just keeps on growing as new vendors join the party and existing players add to their portfolios. Recognizing the enormous opportunity with service providers that want to use existing infrastructure while adding new services, vendors are coming at the multiservice edge from all angles.
For example, Lucent Technologies Inc. has a 5gigabit edge ATM/frame relay switch called the CBX 500 that’s in use with many of the RBOCs and other incumbent providers. So Lucent last month announced a new router card for the CBX 500 that will enable it to support IP VPNs. Michael Nielsen, CTO of INS and president of multiservice switching at Lucent, says the card — which Lucent developed with its partner Juniper Networks Inc.— will be priced in the $50,000 to $100,000 range.
Lucent also unveiled a new member of the CBX family which, unlike the CBX 500, supports MPLS natively. The CBX 3500, which was shipping in early June, can do all the things the CBX 500 does, plus it enables new IP and Ethernet services. The 70gigabit capacity box has native 1gigabit Ethernet interfaces.
Both of the CBX products, which sit in central offices or data centers, include the same network management and feature sets from day one, notes Nielsen.
Meanwhile, Alcatel, which sells the Alcatel 7750 multiservice edge router, at SUPERCOMM unveiled the 1671 Service Connect, an offer the vendor says ushers in a new product category it calls a multiservice cross-connect. The product designed for the metro core and regional metro networks is in trials, and the company claims a win with at least one major, unnamed carrier.
“The product has its roots in the traditional view of cross-connects, but actually does an awful lot more,” says Bruce Miller, vice president of network strategy and advanced architecture for Alcatel’s Optical Networking Division. “It has the ability to provide several levels of TDM grooming and aggregation and has the ability to operate as a more data-centric infrastructure.”
The 1671 Service Connect collapses separate cross-connects for wideband, broadband and narrowband traffic into one.
“In a traditional product architecture, there is a tendency to bind capabilities to physical I/O ports,” says Miller, explaining a particular resource is available to only one port or a group of ports. “In this architecture [for the 1671 Service Connect], we are making those resources available to virtually any port in the box [for use as needed].”
In addition, Miller says the multiservice crossconnect bridges carriers’ migrations to unified data cores, which typically are MPLS-based. “The product has the ability to take various data protocols and provide aggregation and adaptation to what is essentially an IP router core and create savings there because you are preaggregating traffic and preformatting it,” Miller explains.
Also this summer, Nortel Networks revealed its long-awaited multiservice edge strategy.
The company in May unveiled its MPE 9000 multiservice edge solution, an MPLS-based product that converges legacy and new services at the core. Nortel says the box offers new reliability, scalability and traffic prioritization at the edge. “Yesterday’s edge requirement was for the biggest, fastest router,” says Sue Spradley, president of wireline networks at Nortel. “Today’s requirements are ultra-reliability and the ability to support multiple services with the highest performance and cost-efficiency.”
The MPE 9000 series will be available in the fourth quarter of 2004, and is the first product to be announced from a planned family of multiservice IP devices designed around Nortel Networks’ vision of resilient IP networks.
Nortel followed its MPE 9000 announcement with the introduction of the Services Edge Router 5500, which will be available this month.
An enhanced, rebranded version of the Shasta 5000 Broadband Service node, the 5500 is in the same category as service-enabling routers sold by CoSine Communications Inc., Juniper Networks and Redback Networks Inc. These network-based products sit relatively close to the customers to enable remote access support, hosted firewall, network address translation and other value-added services and features.
New cards and software enhancements in the Nortel SER 5500 offer support for The DSL Forum’s TR-059 specification on dynamic quality of service. The SER 5500 also offers double the capacity of the Shasta box, says Terry Boland, senior manager of wireline marketing.
In a similar vein, Laurel Networks Inc. last month came out with the ST50 Service Edge Router, a smaller version of its existing ST200 multiservice edge router.
While both the ST50 and the ST200 are service edge routing platforms with full BRAS features, the ST200 addresses highdensity PoPs and high-density COs while the ST50 was designed for remote COs or PoPs with little or no aggregation requirements. The ST200, unveiled two years ago, has a capacity of 160gbps. The ST50 tops out at 5gbps and can support up to 32,000 subscribers.
Steve Vogelsang, Laurel’s vice president of marketing and co-founder, declined to provide pricing for the ST50, but he says it’s much less expensive than comparable products from Juniper and Redback, which he says require a large number of interfaces. The ST50, he says, can be configured with as few as two ports.
Adding more fuel to the multiservice edge movement, RBN at SUPERCOMM last month fired up its Service Networks Initiative and the RBNi GigaEdge 2330, a generic framing procedurebased multiplexer.
The RBNi GigaEdge 2330 will take in and aggregate on a single stream a variety of services including ATM, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, FICON, SAN and SONET. The 2330 can be deployed at the customer premises or in a multiuser building basement to aggregate services back to a CO or can send that traffic to the RBN CWDM GigaEdge 8200, which is used by several carriers around the world, for transport over the WAN.
In addition, startup Hammerhead Systems recently moved into the multiservice fray with Sharktooth, an edge switch that enables a service provider to migrate existing data services from legacy ATM networks to an MPLS-based backbone while adding new Ethernet services.
