Cisco taps into mobile and video explosion with ASR 9000
Published: 13 November, 2008
Not a man to be daunted by a global downturn, Cisco CEO John Chambers claims this will be a time to help pressurized carriers respond cost-effectively to their greatest challenge - delivering vast amounts of data traffic over mobile as well as fixed links - and emerge from recession with strengthened relationships in the cellco sector. A key product behind this strategy to support operators' all-IP rescue plans is the new ASR 9000 edge router, a high end offering designed for what Cisco calls the "zettabyte era".
Cisco argues that carriers, in order to survive themselves, will have to progress towards all-IP networks, as these networks will allow them to deliver attractive services, such as video, cost effectively; will cut their operating costs; and will position them strongly for the recovery. The move to all-IP has always represented a natural opportunity for the internet router giant to make a stronger mark in the telecoms world, and having entered the aggregation services router (ASR) sector just eight months, Cisco has now delivered a massive workhorse for carrying IP traffic, geared to the mobile and video explosions.
The 9000's marketing hype says the product will help prepare carriers to be able to serve zettabytes (a sextillion bytes) of internet traffic, a level that some analysts believe will be reached within 6-7 years. It costs $80,000 and adds 6.4Tbps (terabytes per second) to the capacity of any existing router, says Cisco, which means 400Gbps per slot. This is achieved using the vendor's IP over DWDM (dense wave division multiplexing) technology.
It also includes Cisco's new Advanced Video Services (AVS) module to support faster video streaming, content caching, advert insertion, fast channel changing and error correction at the network edge. It is designed to work with Cisco's core network systems, notably the CRS-1 (Carrier Routing System), which currently supports 92Tbps.
Cisco says that service providers, despite their spending pressures, must make decisions for the 'zettabyte era' now, and that some carriers are already showing active interest, notably Japan's Softbank and AT&T. "Earlier generations of edge routers were not designed to address the massive growth that IP video is driving across mobile and wireline networks," commented Junishi Miyakawa, director and CTO of Softbank Mobile and Softbank Telecom.
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