Cisco courts RBOCs with metro gear

ATLANTA--Cisco began the week of the Optical Fiber Communication Conference with a spate of minor product enhancements seemingly framed as an appeal to regional Bell operating companies to adopt its line of metro dense wavelength-division multiplexing gear.

Among the announcements, Cisco added BLSR topology to its ONS 15600 multiservice switching platform and achieved Osmine certification for the platform, both appeasements meant to help win RBOC customers.

The vendor also announced some upgrades to its 15454 add/drop multiplexers, including the addition of short- and intermediate-reach options for OC-192 links to better suit metro deployment. Cisco also doubled the density of the 15454s, including eight OC-3 ports where before there were only four. The 15454 now can terminate up to 40 protected interfaces instead of the previous five, according to Robert Koslowski, marketing director for Cisco’s optical networking group.

Cisco is counting on customers using its ONS 15600 platform, introduced at last year’s NFOEC show, to consolidate OC-48 traffic from its successful 15454 boxes, of which the vendor has sold more than 40,000 units to a variety of carrier and enterprise customers, including Qwest. Cisco is likely to sell the platform first to customers with 15454s already deployed--preferably those with eight to ten OC-48 rings, which can take advantage of the cost benefits of the 15600’s aggregation abilities and eliminate the need for DS-3 cross-connects. But to capture more of the RBOC market, Cisco will have to unseat established cross-connect vendors like Tellabs.

“I think [Cisco is] going to have a very tough time going up against the Tellabs 6500,” said Dave Gross, director of research for CIR. “When it comes to cross-connects, its largely Tellabs’ market.”

So far 10 customers are using the 15600, according to Cisco, but only three have been named: US Signal and Looking Glass (both named last year) and SDN Communications, named this week. SDN, an independent telephone cooperative with a network spanning South Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska, is using the 15600 to aggregate traffic from the 15454s it already uses to deliver Sonet-based and Ethernet services.

SDN expects a 75% increase in productivity, the company said.