Alcatel’s Ethernet switch grows, its router shrinks

Alcatel today unveiled a larger version of its Ethernet aggregation switch and a smaller version of its services router today.

The newest version of Alcatel’s 7450 Ethernet services switch is nearly twice the capacity of the previous version, with 12 slots and 400 Gb/s of capacity. (The previous version has seven slots, each capable of 40 Gb/s.) The equipment vendor believes demand for the bulkier gear will be driven by increases in broadband traffic from IPTV and gigabit passive optical networks.

The 7450’s new higher slot count now matches that of the 7750 multiservice edge router, which is often deployed with the 7450 in edge networks. The 7750, which has had 12 slots for years now, is in no need of an expansion anytime soon, said Lindsay Newell, Alcatel’s vice president of product marketing. “We’re not seeing demand for more than half a terabit [per second capacity] in the multiservice edge router market.”

Newell expects the new Ethernet switch to strengthen the vendor’s growing market share in edge networks. “Anyone coming into this market is now faced with a platform that’s twice the capacity of what we were previously capable of doing,” he said.

Also this month, Alcatel is making available a new four-slot, 9-Gb/s version of the 7710 services router it launched in March. The new router has a third the slots and three-fourths the capacity of its predecessor and costs about 25% to 30% less. It has all the features of the larger version except a single built-in switch fabric. The new modular version has two switch fabrics, so it doesn’t offer the non-stop routing that the larger version does. Whereas the 12-slot version can immediately revert to a backup in times of failure without impacting service, the new four-slot version will have to reboot and re-establish the network topology.

Alcatel is marketing the new 7710 mainly to incumbent carriers and expects it to be particularly appealing to mobile carriers, such as the unnamed one in Eastern Europe that is currently deploying it in both its aggregation networks and in a converged backbone.