Light Reading, today published the first independent evaluation of the Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System, the 40-Gbit/s core router platform from Cisco Systems.
“This test represented an industry first in terms of the scale of traffic, routes, and service involved,” says Dave Bass, vice president and general manager of Agilent’s Data Networks Division. “Agilent’s 40G N2X test solution verified that the Cisco CRS-1 could easily manage 640-Gbit/s full duplex throughput across 15 million traffic flows, and scale to 57,000 MPLS LSPs [label switched paths], raising performance expectations for next-generation carrier routers.”
“The CRS-1 scaled to Terabits per second of bandwidth and tens of millions of IPv4 and IPv6 flows. Software upgrades took only nanoseconds — even on a fully loaded, live chassis.”
Cisco also unveiled more than 20 LAN switching products this week, designed to improve security, availability, performance and investment protection. Among the key additions to the company’s Catalyst line include, Catalyst 6500 and 4500 Series with integrated 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and Catalyst 6500, 3750 and 3560 10/100/1000M bit/sec Power Over Ethernet (PoE) products.
John McCool, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Gigabit Switching business unit, explains the new products and how they will help corporations increase productivity and reduce costs.
Cisco’s CRS-1 router is used in the NSF-funded National LambaRail program. Photonic switching is used by Glimmerglass and Calient. Calient s MEMS-based mirror array switching technology, enables hundreds of streams of light to be switched in a volume the size of a sugar cube. Photonic switches are being utilized to deliver dedicated fiber (or light frequencies) to end users, as needed.
When every city block wants hundreds of Mbps of wireless services, perhaps MPLS and optical switches/routers such as these can deliver the goods more cost/effectively than traditional backbones. BellSouth, SBC, Qwest and Verizon are targeting the mid-market with their MPLS services. The MPLS Resource Center and the MPLS Forum have more news.
Broadband Reports offers this insight on fiber plans by telcos in the United States;
“SBC in 2010 will be offering slower speeds than France and Japan in 2005,” notes industry analyst Dave Burstein, who chimes in on “Project Lightspeed”, the company’s effort to offer ADSL2+ to residential users. Wall Street is apparently more impressed with Verizon, since they’ll eventually be offering fiber right to the user’s door - as well as spending $29 billion more on their next generation network.
GigaBeam Corporation is deploying Gigabit/second “virtual fiber” throughout the New York metropolitan region. GigaBeam says next year their products will be capable of 10 Gigabits-per-second, and utilize the 10 Gigabit Ethernet protocol standard.
The point-to-point wireless system uses very high radio frequency at 71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz to transmit at multi-gigabit- per-second speed. This portion of the radio frequency spectrum recently was authorized by the FCC for wireless point-to- point commercial use and can utilize Gigabit Ethernet protocols.
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