* Force10’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet equipment in Vonage’s VoIP network
Vonage Networks this week announced that it is upgrading its VoIP network with Force10 Networks’ TeraScale E-Series of switch/routers. While this is a nationwide network, what’s interesting is that these switches use Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
Vonage is one of the poster companies for VoIP, and it provides broadband telephone services to U.S. residential customers. The company says it grew more quickly than it expected, and now it needs to upgrade a network that’s just four years old. The new equipment gives Vonage high density and resiliency, the company says.
Force10 points to the win as proof that Ethernet’s magic is working in the wide area. While Ethernet, as everyone knows, got its start in the LAN, it is now being taken quite seriously as a WAN transport.
The Force10 equipment will go into points of presence in major metropolitan areas across the country. The TeraScale E-Series switch/routers will go in the core of Vonage’s network, allowing Vonage to collapse its distribution and aggregation layers into a single layer.
These devices have 5T bit/sec of capacity on their backplanes and can support up to 672 lines of Gigabit Ethernet or 56 lines of 10 Gigabit. Force10 claims the system in the future can support even higher densities or move to 40G bit/sec or 100G bit/sec Ethernet if such a thing were ever to come to pass.
They handle IP-based phone calls for Vonage, which allows customers to make and receive those calls from a high-speed Internet connection.
