Overture moves upstream to Ethernet aggregation

Access equipment vendor Overture Networks made a bid to move further upstream in carrier networks today by unveiling a new product for aggregating traffic in central offices for Ethernet migration.

The new ISG 6000 is designed to aggregate various types of legacy and packet-based traffic, converting it to Ethernet (or not) before uplinking to larger switches and routers.

“The first aggregation can be done at Layer 2,” said Chip Redding, Overture’s vice president of marketing and product management. “We can hand it off as whatever the upstream switch or router is doing.”

Overture has been selling Ethernet access and customer premises equipment (CPEs) for eight years now, having won customers including Verizon Business and Time Warner Telecom. Its gear works with fiber and copper networks (bonding DS-1s and DS-3s, for example) and allows carriers to combine Layer 1, Layer 2 and Layer 3 services in a single device, using pseudowire technology for packetizing voice services. Its partners include Juniper Networks and Tellabs.

As deployment of Overture’s customer-located gear grew (the vendor now claims 162 customers in 25 countries) and carriers began to stack them, they asked the vendor for a denser version of the products, which is what Overture unveiled today. Whereas the company’s previously largest gear offered up to 2 gigabit-Ethernet uplinks, the new 3-rack-unit 6000 offers up to 4. The 6000 also includes 24 10/100 Ethernet ports or 672 DS-1 equivalents.

“Customers were saying, ‘I don’t want to have a voice switch or an Ethernet switch or a router out there at edge of my network,” Redding said. “I want some way to pull all that together.”