Zhone Technologies Inc. (ZHNE) announced a new addition to its multiservice access platform family designed to handle escalating traffic volume. The new MXK platforms feature non-blocking capacity of up to 3,600 100mbps GPON subscribers or 360 1gbps Active Ethernet subscribers per chassis and is upgradeable to 1 Terabyte switching capacity by uplink replacement alone.
In addition, Zhone named several carrier customers presently using the platform, which was made available in April.
Steven Glapa, vice president of product management and marketing, told xchange that traffic volumes are increasing at a greater rate than predicted. He points to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, which has a five-year forecast that in 2007 was a gentle slope to 4,000 terabits in 2011, but in 2009 bends at a 45-degree angle in 2010, passing 10,000 terabits in 2011 and heading toward 18,000 terabits by 2013.
The change can be attributed to shifting traffic – from multicast to unicast, Glapa said, again citing Cisco’s estimates that 86 percent of traffic will be unicast by 2013. And that makes all the difference for service providers. “As you go to 86 percent unicast, the demand for much, much bigger uplinks, much more capacity in the distribution network and a lot more capacity in the backplane of the box it self goes way up,” he said.
To address this change, Glapa said Zhone started with a fresh architecture. “Typical first-generation MSAP had bus architectures on their backplane where it’s essentially a shared medium. With the advent of all of this streaming media and dedicated bandwidth and service providers provisioning for nonblocking service to individual subscribers, the box itself has to have a nonblocking path for a tremendous amount of traffic,” he said, noting that Zhone’s MXK uses a star architecture. “In this architecture you have dedicated connections and redundant connections between each line card and each uplink.”
