Alcatel announced today the 1671 Service Connect, an offer the optical networking 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, in an advance interview with XCHANGE. “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 traditionally 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].”
Resources for transmultiplexing or data capabilities reside in a “server module,” or blade, that fits in the I/O shelves. “You can take the individual traffic and send it to the right server [module]. You don’t care what port it’s coming in or what granularity. You just send it to the right place and process it. You can think of it as a bulk-processing entity.”
For the launch, one server module is available to support transmultiplexing of analog voice to a T1 bit stream. A data server module supporting multiple data protocols is planned.
Blades can be added for new services or to increase capacity as the business case supports expansion, he adds. A carrier shifting traffic from frame relay to Ethernet, for example, might add server modules to support that transition over time so as to not strand any of its infrastructure.
In addition, Miller says the multiservice cross-connect 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’s essentially an IP router core and create savings there because you are pre-aggregating traffic and preformatting it,” he explains.
Miler declined to reveal pricing for the 1671 Service Connect, but notes that it’s smaller footprint – six to eight times smaller than traditional equipment – and lower power consumption combine with a new optimized platform for cost efficiencies not found in the market today.
