Internet traffic cop Router roadblocks negotiated with new hardware from Ascend >BY Denise Pappalardo, East Coast Bureau Chief

As Nostradamus-like predictions loom around the Internet about catastrophic network failures, vendors are designing routing technology that will keep up with the high-speed switching fabric being deployed by many Internet service providers.

Telephony learned last week that Ascend Communications plans to announce its GRF 400 Internet protocol switch to address this problem at the fall Networld+Interop trade show in Atlanta next week. The switch offers ISPs and carriers the IP addressing intelligence of routers and the speed of switches in a single device. The GRF 400 stems from Ascend's recent acquisition of NetStar, a high-speed routing company.

Cisco StrataCom is taking a similar route. Sources close to the company said Cisco StrataCom will announce a new protocol that will "marry the flexibility of layer 3 routing with performance of layer 2 switching." The company is not developing a new box but is optimizing the speed and functionality of Cisco routers and StrataCom switches for the Internet and intranet environments. Cisco StrataCom is also expected to introduce its enhancements at Networld+Interop.

Ascend and Cisco StrataCom are trying to fix bottlenecks surfacing across ISP networks, caused primarily by IP addresses that have outgrown router architectures and slow route table look-up capabilities, said Bernie Schneider, vice president of strategic business development at the Alameda, Calif.-based Ascend.

The GRF 400 will allow ISPs and carriers to support layer 1 IP switching and layer 3 routing. The switching functionality is an off-the-shelf chip set, but the route tables were designed by Ascend, Schneider said.

Ascend has distributed the routing function into cards that plug directly into the GRF 400. The distributed environment eliminates central processing unit saturation and central route tables, Schneider said. Each card has its own processing power to do its own route table look-up using Ascend's proprietary hardware mechanism and keep up with the speeds of the switching fabric at 4 Gb/s.

Carriers can expect higher routing throughput because the route table look-up capability has been put into a hardware device, Schneider said. The GRF 400 is part of Ascend's Mega Point-of-Presence concept that includes its Max Hub and Max TNT device (Telephony, Sept. 2, page 1), which Ascend will demonstrate at Networld+Interop.

MegaPOP offers carriers a network architecture in which each packet is fully routed over 155 Mb/s speeds today and 622 Mb/s speeds by the first quarter of next year, Schneider said.

Ascend's fast routing capability did not happen overnight. It's coming from the company's acquisition of NetStar, said Jordan Stone, senior analyst at Infonetics Research, San Jose. "NetStar's high-speed routing is a fairly mature technology," he said.

Although Ascend's approach to solving Internet logjams is savvy, it has a challenging sell ahead, Stone said. "There is a huge installed base of Cisco 7500 and Cisco 7000 routers out there that will be hard to break into," he said.

This will be especially true if Cisco's software upgrade proves to be as scalable as Ascend's design. ISPs may not opt to buy new hardware if they can simply get a software upgrade, he said.

The ISP market has been Ascend's strongest area. The company is planning to strengthen its hold with its latest IP addition. But Stone said it's too soon to tell which approach will win over the ISP and carrier community.

Analysts speculated that other router vendors may not have gone with a hardware-based route table look-up function simply because they have an installed base and existing products they don't want to make obsolete.

Cisco Systems, the parent company, is believed to be sticking to its software guns with its latest enhancement-offering its router and StrataCom switch customers new software functionality that promises much of the scalability and speed of Ascend but in a multiprotocol environment.

Ipsilon, an IP switch manufacturer, has been making headlines lately with its asynchronous transfer mode-centric IP switch design. The design is specific to one media type, whereas Ascend's and Cisco's solutions offer carriers a choice of many media types. The GRF 400 does not tie the carrier into ATM but lets the carrier connect directly to the device through an ATM, Sonet or frame relay, Schneider said.

"Many carriers don't want to commit to an ATM-only solution because of the overhead involved," Schneider said. ATM's best-case scenario includes at least 10% overhead with each cell transmitted.

The GRF 400 is available for $91,000 to $96,000, depending on configuration.