Cisco abandons Wavelength Router

(Telephony) Paying $500 million for a company may be easy to do when the economy is good but deciding to discontinue the product for which the company was purchased can’t be easy. However, Carl Russo, Cisco Systems’ vice president of the optical networking group, today said the company is discontinuing the ONS 15900 Wavelength Router.

The Wavelength Router optical cross connect came under the Cisco umbrella as the result of a $500 million acquisition of Monterey Networks in 1999. Cisco purchased Cerent at the same time for $6.9 billion. While the Wavelength Router has had little success with deployment, the products obtained from the Cerent acquisition have been providing good news and revenue despite slowed carrier spending.

“The market continues to take a long time to get going,” Russo said referring to the core mesh market.

Russo said there is a continued shift from spending in the core to spending in the metropolitan space.

Cisco plans to focus more on metropolitan optical and long-haul DWDM equipment, Russo said.

Considering the low demand for the product in that space, the Wavelength Router discontinuation shouldn’t leave much of a gap, according to Russo.

Cisco intends to redeploy the employees affected by the discontinuation, he said.