SPRINT SETS RECORD AT 40 GIGS

Sprint claimed an industry first last week by carrying live Internet traffic across its network at 40 Gb/s. Sprint used Cisco's new Carrier Routing System (CRS-1), StrataLight's OC-768c optical transport and Ciena's dense wave division multiplexing technology to carry traffic across its production IP network between San Jose and Stockton, Calif. The accomplishment is another notch on Sprint's growing list of first moves, which includes being the first long-distance carrier to provide Internet service in 1992, the first to deploy OC-12c Packet over Sonet/SDH and the first to deploy at OC-48 speeds over the Internet.

Cisco launched the CRS-1 last month with much fanfare that included a demonstration by MCI of the router's 40 Gb/s capabilities (Telephony, May 31, 2004, page 16).

“There is a good bit of difference between carrying live customer traffic and doing a demo in a controlled environment,” said Chase Cotton, director of data engineering at Sprint.

Sprint has been working with Cisco on development of the router since 1999 when the CRS-1 was known by the more prosaic acronym, the BFR, Cotton said. Sprint deployed a prototype of the CRS-1 in its network as an edge device in October. On May 23, Sprint moved the router into the core of its SprintLink backbone.

“We have always prided ourselves on being there when the customer wants to move up to the next level. This is the next step in our ability to scale to any arbitrary size,” Cotton said.

Customers such as Bank of America, which signed a 10-year agreement with Sprint for advanced data services, already are pushing the limits of Sprint's 10 Gb/s service, Cotton said.

The same motivation is pushing MCI toward the Cisco CRS-1. “Reliability is first and foremost, but scalability is important because we have to be able to grow the network in time to meet the demand of our customers,” Jack Wimmer, vice president of network architecture and advanced technology at MCI, said at last month's 40 Gb/s demonstration.

Once deployed as both an edge and a core system, the CRS-1 has the potential to replace as many as 40 routers at a single site. During the trial phase, Sprint identified some issues that it said Cisco has already addressed with patches.

“One of the reasons we run these production tests is that with IP, you can't always reproduce problems in the lab. You have to be connected to a production network,” Cotton said.