Cisco gets into fiber-to-the-MDU

Cisco Systems entered the fiber-to-the-multidwelling-unit market today with new customer premises gear based on an active Ethernet architecture and a new proprietary protocol to add resiliency.

Generally available worldwide now, the ME 3400 24 FS includes 24 100 Mb/s ports that can be fiber- or copper-fed and a 2 Gb/s uplink. It is designed to sit in the basements of apartment complexes, for example, providing fiber-based services to residents therein.

Along with the 24 FS, Cisco is using a new proprietary protocol it calls Resilient Ethernet Protocol (REP) to offer 50-millisecond recovery from the network core to the customer. An alternative to MPLS in access networks, REP is a segment-based technology that can be deployed in network rings. Cisco recently began discussing standardizing REP with the Internet Engineering Task Force, which has not assigned a working group to the protocol at this time.

Cisco also introduced an Embedded Event Manager (EEM), available on the 3400 platform through software upgrades, which is designed to aid in troubleshooting and performance monitoring. Carriers can program the EEM to alert them when network utilization reaches certain specified levels, for example, potentially guarding against denial of service attacks.

Active Ethernet networks are less popular among U.S. carriers than passive optical networks, Cisco executives acknowledged. “We’ve found a lot of traction for this, particularly in Europe and Asia,” said Mike Capuano, head of the service provider marketing group for Cisco. “Admittedly it’s not as big a thing in the U.S., though we have seen some of that change a little bit. And from an aggregation perspective, we offer access-agnostic aggregation networks.”