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Lucent rolls out ATM switches

By David Rohde
Network World

Lucent Technologies, Inc. Wednesday is expected to detail its long-anticipated entry into the enterprise switching market with its own products.

The vendor's key technology will be ATM, and its message will be that it can deliver multimedia switching for 25% less than comparable products with enhanced quality-of-service characteristics.

The flagship of Lucent's new effort will be the Lucent MX 1000, an ATM multiservice switch that can alternatively serve as a carrier edge switch or a high-end enterprise-network switch. The 10G bit/sec non-blocking switch will contain 14 slots, each providing 622M bit/sec of bandwidth.

The key to the MX 1000 will be a connection admission control (CAC) algorithm developed by Lucent's Bell Laboratories unit. Lucent claims its CAC algorithm can establish virtual circuits for both voice and data traffic over ATM's multiple service classes such as variable bit rate. The goal is to provide traffic-engineering efficiencies that can save carriers and users money over a unified voice and data network infrastructure, said Susan Barbier, Lucent's market development director for data networking.

Lucent will also unveil an ATM campus backbone switch, two access concentrators that enable users to concentrate a variety of lower-speed services onto an ATM infrastructure, and a new release of its existing GlobeView 2000 large carrier switch.

In addition, the vendor will announce an ATM interface card for its Definity PBX. Though not widely expected to be adopted by Lucent's huge PBX installed base, Barbier said the new configuration is expected to be of interest to large call centers that use the Definity both as an automatic call distributor for hundreds or thousands of agents and as an access switch to ATM LAN and WAN infrastructures.

Wednesday's unveiling will not be the first time Lucent has announced a strategy to attack the enterprise networking market. The difference is that this time Lucent is building its own products, and placing them in recognizable categories to network IS buyers.

Nearly two years ago, after AT&T announced that it was spinning off its communications-equipment company but before the company even had a name, officials of what became Lucent unveiled with considerable fanfare the Multimedia Communications Exchange (MMCX) server. The Ethernet-attached MMCX is designed to sit between a Lucent Definity PBX and an Ethernet switch to provide telephony instructions such as hold, conference and transfer to real-time desktop dataconferencing and videoconferencing sessions. But the product has struggle to gain user acceptance, owing to its high cost and niche applications.

Officials with key Lucent rival Northern Telecom, Inc. - which runs neck-and-neck with Lucent in their primary markets of PBXs and central office telephone switches - said the new MX 1000 offers many of the same multiservice characteristics of Nortel's Magellan ATM and frame relay switches.

"This is an endorsement of the enterprise switch concept," said Mark Tharby, group marketing manager for Nortel Magellan. "But the reality is they have a long way to catch up."

Nortel has already sewn up key accounts like Sprint Corp., which recently installed 32 Magellan Passports to provide class-of-service guarantees for frame relay. Tharby suggested that Lucent may be aiming to dislodge Cisco Systems Corp.'s Stratacom ATM switches as the frame relay backbone of Lucent's old parent, AT&T.