Axiowave comes out of hiding

Axiowave, which until recently had talked about little beyond the fact that it had raised nearly $100 million in funding in a difficult environment, is revealing a little more this week with the announcement that it has its first product up and running in live networks.

The XCR128, what the company is calling a service convergence router, is aimed at carriers who have come to the realization that simply over-provisioning bandwidth for IP traffic, which continues to decline in cost-per-bit, is a losing proposition, said Mukesh Chatter, co-founder, president and CEO of Axiowave. That is particularly true with the greater push toward voice over IP.

"Voice over IP is forcing people to create thin pipes on a wider scale," said Chatter, whose last start-up, Nexabit, was bought by Lucent Technologies for just shy of $1 billion in 1999.

The other result of carriers being forced to over provision is that most of the data pipes are reserved for best-effort traffic, which is subject to the most ferocious price competition. The XCR128 uses some ATM characteristics such as reserving chunks of bandwidth specifically for premium services while leaving less for best effort, which can burst up and down as allowable.

The result is bandwidth utilization that tops 90% as opposed to more typical 30% for traditional IP/MPLS networks. Additionally, carriers can offer ATM-grade service level agreements on IP/MPLS services.

"We built our box to let [carriers] migrate to profitable IP," Chatter said.