Best effort gets better

One of the evident themes in product announcements at this year's big trade show is the transformation of Ethernet from a best-effort technology to one capable of meeting the stringent performance requirements of voice and video.

Some vendors are announcing greater quality-of-service features for Ethernet gear, including Adva Optical Networking, MRV Communications and Ciena, which has a new Ethernet services module for its CoreDirector optical switch that bridges Ethernet and mesh networking, assigning bandwidth profiles to each service for traffic management.

Alcatel is introducing the North American version of its Ethernet-centric multiservice provisioning platform (MSPP), a contrast to today's fundamentally Sonet-based MSPPs. Carriers can decide how many of the 12 10 Gb/s input/output cards in the new 1850 Transport Service Switch will be TDM-based and how many will be Ethernet- or wavelength-based. Because all the cards share a common universal switching fabric within the chassis, carriers avoid the need to map Ethernet over Sonet in the matrix and eliminate the bottleneck of interconnecting different cards or boxes that Sonet MSPPs sometimes require. “[The 1850] is designed the way you'd design an Ethernet switch, with no architectural restrictions,” said Bruce Miller, Alcatel's vice president of network strategy and advanced development.

Juniper Networks is touting four new modular Ethernet interface cards for its M- and T-series routers. Aggregating traffic from access and other aggregation networks, Juniper's gear will — like the CoreDirector — identify traffic types and protect the most important ones when networks get congested. This will aid Ethernet's evolution from a best-effort service throwing excess bandwidth at performance concerns to one that can be packed more tightly for greater efficiency.

“Say you've got a 1 Gb/s uplink averaging 200 Mb/s of traffic but spiking to 400 Mb/s,” said Tom DiMicelli, Juniper's product marketing manager. “You have the opportunity to overprovision there so that, instead of five 1 Gb/s ports, you can support it with one.”

Other vendors are using copper bonding technologies to extend Ethernet's footprint and reach. Anda Networks is unveiling a new product at the show, the EtherSlam, which is an Ethernet access line multiplexer that offers 168 terminations per shelf using channelized DS-3 interfaces.

Aktino is introducing a new copper bonding platform for point-to-multipoint Ethernet networks, the AK5000, which fits 1 Gb/s of symmetric bandwidth per shelf, dedicating one five-rack-unit line card to each business customer. The platform can grow from 5 Gb/s to 50 Gb/s per card.