* Globalcomm 2006 announcements by Juniper, Ericsson, Cisco and Time Warner
Globalcomm 2006 was held last week in Chicago and two themes of industry interest are clear. Today, we’ll cover some announcements about emerging capacity on the edge of carrier networks and next time we’ll take a look at how increasing demand for video services may change the face of core networks.
Juniper announced new Ethernet services cards to provide high-density Ethernet interfaces and “advanced, fine-grained QoS functionality.” The new cards support Juniper’s Ethernet Services Engine technology and are designed for Juniper’s M- and T-series routing platforms. The new interfaces are positioned to support carrier deployments of virtual LANs, Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPNs, and Video over IP, offering service-level agreement (SLA) support through the QoS features.
Ericsson announced a VDSL2 initiative that, according to its statement affords a “tenfold performance improvement over previous generations.” Ericsson correctly pointed out that carriers are looking for more efficient ways to offer the multiple stream needed over cooper to provide interactive high-definition video.
Cisco introduced an Intelligent Services Gateway (ISG) for multimedia services focusing on the “multiscreen” services that carriers are touting for converged fixed/mobile services. The company also announced new performance enhancements to the Cisco 10000 and Cisco 7200 Series routers.
Time Warner Telecom announced enhancements to its Ethernet services with a ‘branch office’ solution that includes Metro Ethernet, Ethernet Internet Services (EIS) and voice services.
Finally, Lucent introduced a converged optical/packet transport platform for high-bandwidth multimedia services with the Universal Packet Mux (UPM) to offer cost-effectively supports for WDM, Ethernet, and TDM traffic. The platform is part of Lucent’s Acuity Network Architecture, for “service aware” networks “that adjust dynamically to meet changing bandwidth and QoS requirements.”
In its briefing to the press and analyst community, Lucent also touted a recent Bell Labs study that suggests the network traffic for video on demand and point-to-point video services will eclipse the network capacity needed for data service by the year 2010. The report found that these two video services could consume more that 60% of metropolitan-area network capacity by the end of this decade.
Next time, we’ll take a look at why Microsoft might agree about the need for increasing network support of video services.
* Check out this Network World story for more about the Globalcomm 2006 announcements by Cisco, Juniper and Nortel.
