Cisco enhances 7200 router for voice

San Jose

The additions Cisco rolled out last week for its 7200 series router are designed to help users reduce telecommunications costs by running voice over router networks.

The extensions include a new 7200 chassis, a beefed-up processor, and voice and video integration capabilities. The enhancements help fill out Cisco's packetized voice arsenal, the chief component of which is a "network PBX" for campus multiservice networks that Cisco obtained from its acquisition of Selsius Systems.

A network PBX provides server call control and management over IP networks and serves as a gateway to analog, circuit-switched telephony gear.

JC Bradford, a Nashville, Tenn., investment bank, is saving $150,000 per year with a campus multiservice network based on Cisco's LightStream 1010 ATM switches.

"You can't tell that it's not plain old telephone service," says Dean Qualls, network operations manager at JC Bradford.

Now Qualls can include his 7200 routers in this campus multiservice network scenario. New products and features for the 7200 include the four- and six-slot 7200VXR chassis, the NPE-300 processing engine and a technology called Multiservice Interchange that lets the router serve as a digital cross connect switch or add/drop multiplexer.

For the 7200VXR, Cisco enhanced the 7200 midplane, which connects the port adapters to the NPE-300 processor. The VXR midplane provides up to 1G bit/sec of throughput and twice as much bandwidth as a standard 7200 midplane.

The NPE-300 provides a 50% increase in performance for the 7200, to 300,000 packet/sec. A Cisco 7200VXR equipped with an NPE-300 can support up to six port adapters and enable connectivity via Gigabit Ethernet and OC-12 ATM. In addition, the NPE-300 increases the amount of main memory to 256M bytes of SDRAM, double the limit of 128M bytes of DRAM on the NPE-200.

Park 'N View, which provides cable TV, telephone and Internet access to long-haul truckers, is using 7200s to deliver multiservice IP to 160 truck stops across the country.

Voice quality on the router net is excellent, according to Steve Conkling, president and chief operating officer of the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., company.

"We spent a lot of time [on voice quality] because the delay problem in the 'Net and so forth can really impede the quality, but that's not been a problem we've run into," Conkling says. "In our system, you can't tell the difference between a normal phone and the one running over the Internet."

Cisco 7200 customer Tutor Time, a high-tech child care company in West Palm Beach, Fla., is saving money on distance learning applications by running voice over its data infrastructure.

"Generally, the long-distance traffic is from the remote centers back to corporate," says Todd Dion, vice president of technology at Tutor Time. "Those calls become free when they're traveling over our internal network."

The Cisco 7206VXR supports up to 48 Ethernet or serial - clear-channel or channelized - ports, 24 token-ring ports, 12 High Speed Serial Interface ports, and six Fast Ethernet or ATM ports. For multichannel networking in channelized T-1, E-1, T-3 or E-3 environments, the Cisco 7200 series VXR can support up to 48 channelized T-1s/E-1s and up to six channelized T-3s/E-3s.

The Cisco 7200 series VXR will be available in December with pricing starting at $14,000. The NPE-300 will also be available in December and will cost $7,500.

Cisco: (408) 526-4000