Allied Telesis this week unveiled a new series 10G Ethernet wring closet switches, promising customers high port density and fast uplink connections, but at a lower cost than its larger enterprise switch competitors.

The AT-9400Ts switch series includes a 48-port and 24-port triple-speed, or 10/100/1000Mbps, box. Each switch has two built-in 10G Ethernet ports based on the 10G Small Form Pluggable (XFP for short) standard. These built-in 10G ports require users to buy just the 10G optics for the switches (depending on the type of fiber cabling used), which makes the switches cost less and easier to set up, the company says.

The 24- and 48-port AT-9424Ts/XP and AT-9448Ts/XP both include native Layer 3 switching on all ports, as well as support for features such as Layer 2 and Layer 3 QoS and Internet Group Management Protocol, used for controlling multicast networks for video and multimedia delivery.

The AT-9424Ts switch is a version without built-in 10G Ethernet XFP ports. Allied Telesis is also offering just a 48-port AT-9448T/SP, a box with four 10G-capable XFP ports aimed at service providers looking to deliver Ethernet services to the edge of customer networks — such as fiber-to-the-curb services, or multi-tenant building Ethernet services.

With the most expensive AT-9400 series switch costing around $5,400, Allied Telesis says its 10G wiring closet boxes are a fraction of the cost of competitive switches from Cisco, Extreme, Foundry Networks and Nortel, which can cost as much as $10,000 for a stackable triple-speed/10G wiring closet switch.

The switches cost: AT-9448Ts/XP for $5,400; the AT-9424Ts/XP for $3,000; the AT-9424Ts for $2,200; and the AT-9448T/SP is $4,000.