WaveSmith introduces migration products

Start-up Wavesmith Networks today announced a new family of multiservice switch products designed to let carriers maximize their legacy ATM networks while investing in their next-generation IP/MPLS plans.

In the rush to develop next-generation IP solutions, vendors failed to address the need for a migration path from ATM switches, which handle the bulk of today’s packet delivery, according to Chad Dunn, WaveSmith’s director of product management.

“If you look inside just about every RBOC or ILEC network, you see this multiservice switching role that is today being serviced by older ATM switches, and that segment of the market really hasn’t been upgraded in a very long time,” he said.

“One of the reasons for that was the fact that vendors … thought there would be this wholesale switch to IP just about everywhere in the network, so this space in the network really didn’t need to be upgraded in terms of ATM functionality.”

WaveSmith plans to provide carriers with a smooth migration path, supporting ATM, frame relay and IP/MPLS traffic. Carriers can pull and insert line cards as needed to make the migration.

The solution supplies remarkable capacity in very small footprint—its DN4100 is 7 inches tall, while the DN2100 is 3.5 inches tall. The comparison of the DN4100 to Lucent’s CBX500 is extremely favorable for WaveSmith, according to Dunn, who added that the CBX500 is found in about 90% of today’s COs.

“What you’re looking at here is a platform that’s drastically smaller physically, takes a tenth of the power—250 watts versus 3000 watts—but provides six times more switching capacity,” he explained.

While the WaveSmith solution scales to a 320 GB platform, its capacity to handle virtual circuits—the primary reason carriers have to buy new boxes, Dunn said—may be more important. For instance, the CBX500 handles less than 8000 virtual circuits, he explained.

“To address that, each line card in our architecture—and you can have up to 15 line cards—supports 128,000 virtual circuits, or PVCs or IP flows,” he said. “In a maximally configured stack, you can have almost 2 million virtual circuits.”

In addition, the WaveSmith technology employs a microkernel architecture, meaning there is no shared memory associated with the operating system. Thus, outages in one part of the network are less likely to impact the rest of the network—an important concept, given recent ATM-related outages in the AT&T and Qwest networks, Dunn noted.

“The fact is, the vast majority of the outages that you see on these large public networks are not due to hardware failure, they are due to software failure,” he explained.

WaveSmith is planning another round of financing in the summer, during which it will conduct trials with carriers such as Genuity, Cable& Wireless USA and Comcast Business.

“Carrying forward our existing services into the next-generation network is an important business strategy for Comcast,” said Steven Linskey, vice president of Comcast Business Communication, in a prepared statement. “The current solutions in this market are struggling to facilitate a smooth migration from ATM to IP/MPLS. We’re confident that WaveSmith’s DN product family will provide us with a smooth migration path.”

Trials with ILECs are expected to begin in the late fall, after WaveSmith completes its NEBs testing, Dunn said. The products are expected to be generally available in the fourth quarter.

Dunn believes WaveSmith’s solution will be particularly attractive to carriers when Lucent makes its next software upgrade, which also will require an expensive memory upgrade. One IXC told WaveSmith that the cost of software and memory upgrades would be as much as it would cost to replace the switches with new WaveSmith products, he added.

“We’re just dying for Lucent’s next version to become generally available,” Dunn said. “Every single Lucent network is going to have to look at that; every single one of them is going to need a memory upgrade. I’ll offer to go up and help [accelerate] that release of code myself.”