Worldwide Packets gets into aggregation

After seven years in access networks, Worldwide Packets is moving upstream.

The equipment vendor is unveiling today a new carrier Ethernet aggregation switch. The modular Lightning Edge 3300 can scale from 24 1-Gb/s ports to (with all four 24-port cards) 96 Gb/s, with dual 10-Gb/s uplinks.

“We’re starting to see we’ve got enough traffic on our customers’ networks that they need a larger product to do aggregation,” said Mike Nielsen, WWP’s executive vice president of product management engineering.

When deployed upstream of service concentrator switches that could divide 1-Gb/s links into 100-Mb/s ones, the 3300 could potentially serve over 1,000 customers, WWP said. Standing just under 11 inches tall, the 3300 can be deployed in small points of presence, collocated with core or service routers or in the basements of office buildings or multi-dwelling units.

The new product enters beta tests next month and will be generally available next quarter. Starting prices will fall in the $25,000 range, WWP said. A second release of the 3300 in the second half of the year will include support for Provider Backbone Transport technology (which the company is currently adding to its LE 311v access product). And early next year it will take on multiprotocol label switching capabilities.

However, the company expects to continue its focus on Layer 2 technologies. And it has no plans to focus any further upstream in the network.

“We have no intention of being in the core,” said Chad Whalen, WWP’s senior vice president of global sales and marketing.

Worldwide Packets anticipates the 3300 being resold by its global partner, Alcatel-Lucent, but doesn’t yet know if that will be the case.