Cisco adds IP multiservice products

New, enhanced wares and architectures intended to convince carriers to open pocketbooks.

SAN JOSE - Cisco last week unveiled a bevy of products designed to convince service providers they can roll out new services profitably on new and existing circuit, packet and cable infrastructures.

Cisco also announced a handful of carrier deployments of its offerings as proof of its initiative. The new products include:

The line card for the ONS 15454, called the ML-series, is designed to provide Cisco IOS-based Layer 2/Layer 3 packet intelligence to the SONET/synchronous digital hierarchy transport system for more efficient support of Ethernet-over-SONET services.

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SAN JOSE - Cisco last week unveiled a bevy of products designed to convince service providers they can roll out new services profitably on new and existing circuit, packet and cable infrastructures.

Cisco also announced a handful of carrier deployments of its offerings as proof of its initiative. The new products include:

• A line card for the Cisco ONS 15454 optical transport system that supports private-line and switched Ethernet services.
• Additions to Cisco's cable modem termination systems (CMTS) to improve scale, performance and reliability.
• Enhancements and additions to Cisco's IP telephony and multiservice integration architectures to support new services and service infrastructures, such as metropolitan Ethernet.
  

The line card for the ONS 15454, called the ML-series, is designed to provide Cisco IOS-based Layer 2/Layer 3 packet intelligence to the SONET/synchronous digital hierarchy transport system for more efficient support of Ethernet-over-SONET services.

The ML-series includes two cards: a 12-port 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet module and a two-port Gigabit Ethernet blade. Each supports Cisco IOS routing software services for packet processing, quality of service and management.

The cards are dealt Features of Cisco's ML-series Ethernet cards for the ONS 15454. • Enable private-line services and Layer 2/3 packet multiplexing into SONET/SDH. • Allow creation of multipoint services. • Establishes quality- of-service interoper-ability with enterprise networks via IOS software IP feature set. • Supports common management with Cisco Transport Manager, SNMP and TL1.

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Analysts say the ML-series should reduce costs for customers.

"Now I put a card in instead of a router," says Deb Mielke, principal of Treillage Network Strategies. "This is the right thing even though in carriers, [transport and router staff] have always been separate operational groups. That's the biggest stumbling block for this: politics."

The ML-series is expected to ship in the first quarter of next year.

For cable multisystem operators, Cisco unveiled extensions to its uBR10000 and uBR7000 CMTS platforms. The extensions for the uBR10000 include a "high-density" Data over Cable Interface Specification processing card that supports five downstream and 20 upstream interfaces; an OC-48 WAN interface card with 50-msec recovery; and DOCSIS stateful switchover capabilities for nondisruptive recovery from line or equipment outages.

The enhancements to the uBR7000 are a new processor for the system, the MPQ1, which Cisco says features a threefold increase in performance and support for more users than its predecessor; and interchassis N+1 failover for high availability.

The new CMTS products will be certified as compliant with the PacketCable specifications early next year, Cisco says.

For IP telephony, Cisco last week announced that several service providers in North America, Asia-Pacific and Europe are delivering IP-based voice, data and video services to business and residential customers via integrated Cisco product architectures. These architectures, which bind together several Cisco application and infrastructure offerings, are called Broadband Local Integrated Services Solution (BLISS), Voice Infrastructure and Applications (VIA), and Managed Voice Services (MVS).