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Cisco brings POP to the MAN

New 10G bit/sec edge routers, line cards designed to broaden service, revenue reach of ISP.

By Jim Duffy
The Edge, 10/02/01

Cisco's latest high-end routing announcement is intended to address three aspects of service provider operations.

The first is expanding the reach of the Internet, allowing service providers to touch new customers or new geographies, such as enabling core ISPs to extend their service reach into the metro.

Indeed, Cisco's new products are designed to enable IP point-of-presence services to extend deep into the metro Ethernet edge.

The second is to enable service providers to offer a suite of "margin-rich" services in addition to traditional transport services.

The third is to help service providers do all this while maintaining control over capital and operational expenditures. The key to this aspect will be the ability of service providers to leverage their existing transport infrastructures for delivery of IP services.

Important to this effort will be use of techniques such as Resilient Packet Ring, "or doing away with SONET layers or ATM layers that we used to have in the past and bringing IP closer to the glass," says Roland Acra, vice president and general manager of the Public Carrier IP group at Cisco.

With that, Cisco yesterday announced three products to address these requirements at the edge of service provider networks.

The first is a four-slot version of Cisco's 12000 series Internet router. The 12404 has an 80G bit/sec switch fabric and occupies five rack units. Cisco now claims to have 10G bit/sec trunking available in small, medium and large form factors for small, medium and large POPs, ranging form the new 12404 to the 16-slot 12016, and double the number of 10G bit/sec routers of the rest of the industry combined, Acra claims.

The 12404 supports all existing 12000 series line cards up and including OC-192, as well as new "IP services engine" line cards unveiled this week. These cards enable high-speed services, such as quality of service, multicast, security, etc., on 10G bit/sec-attached backbone routers.

In essence, it migrates the 12000 from the backbone to a high-speed edge services router, Acra says.

These "high-speed edge" cards will also include dynamically provisioned channelized optical interfaces. Up to now, channelization was largely static in nature, Acra says, meaning a channelized OC-48 could only deliver a single-speed increment of itself - say, DS-3 or OC-3.

Cisco's new line cards allow service providers to mix and match different speed channels for different customers over the same OC-48 optical interface. Service providers will also be able to dynamically change speeds for customers "on the fly" with these new line cards, Acra says. There'll be no need to swap any cards, or reboot or reset the router, he says.

This will help service providers lower capital and operational expenditures, Acra claims.

Rounding out Cisco's high-speed edge launch is the 10720 router, which is a "purpose-built" metro IP access device.

"The intention behind this product is to deliver Ethernet services in the metro, however with the full suite of IP capabilities that you find typically in the POP of an ISP," Acra says.

The 10720 supports Cisco Dynamic Packet Transport technology, which is designed to optimize tranport of packet data and Ethernet over a TDM infrastructure such as SONET. DPT uses the active and the protect parts of a SONET ring, and IP packet-level multiplexing to use the bandwidth all of the time, Acra says.