Cisco enhances carrier router's 40G support

Cisco this week enhanced its CRS-1 carrier core router by adding upgrades to the IP over dense wavelength-division multiplexing interfaces, which help service providers minimize the additional capital expenses associated with traffic growth.

The Cisco technology is also available at the edge of the network on the company's 12000 and 12000XR routers.

The IPoDWDM interface enables 40Gbps throughput over existing 10Gbps optical transport networks, effectively quadrupling the performance of those networks. This throughput gain is achieved without the purchase and operation of additional cross connects and transponders, which serve as the intermediary interconnects between routers and the optical plane.

Citing its own internal evaluations, Cisco says its IPoDWDM modules can save service providers 66% in capital expenditures and 77% in operational expenditures over a five-year period.

The IPoDWDM interface is intended to help service providers handle the growth in video traffic and IPTV applications. According to Cisco, Internet video traffic alone in 2012 will be 400 times the traffic carried by the U.S. Internet backbone in 2000.

Internet video has jumped from 12% of global consumer Internet traffic in 2006 to 22% in 2007, the vendor says, adding that it predicts video on demand, IPTV, peer-to-peer video and Internet video will account for nearly 90% of all consumer IP traffic in 2012.

The enhancements to Cisco's IPoDWDM modules include:

* Doubling the reach of the Cisco CRS-1 40Gbps IPoDWDM to 2,000 kilometers -- about 1,250 miles -- without regeneration.

* Extending IPoDWDM to the XR 12000 and 12000 routers with a new 10 Gigabit Ethernet shared port adapter that enables bandwidth up to 10Gbps over 2,000 kilometers.

* Reducing provisioning on the Cisco ONS 15454 optical transport platform with a reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer. Cisco says this will decrease truck rolls and lower the requirements for power, space and cooling by more than 50%.

* Resetting failover benchmarks to 15 ms, three times faster than the industry standard of 50 ms, for increased resiliency against fiber cuts.

* Enabling direct management of optics integrated into the router.

The module includes a tunable 1-port 40Gbps OC-768c/STM-256c WDM packet-over-SONET interface, and a tunable four-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet WDM interface.

Sprint is implementing the IPoDWDM interfaces on its CRS-1s across its IP network, Cisco says. Sprint is deploying the CRS-1 in more than 25 U.S. cities.

The IPoDWDM implementation works with Ciena CoreStream optical transports systems, of which Sprint has about 1,000 deployed.