Globalcomm: Lucent unveils Acuity

CHICAGO--Lucent Technologies unveiled two new products this week aimed at helping carriers manage the quality of packet-based services such as IPTV, particularly when blended with others such as voice. Both products are part of a new network architecture Lucent is calling Acuity.

The Acuity architecture is designed to allow efficient network management by dynamically adjusting bandwidth and quality-of-service (QoS) parameters for individual services, allowing end-to-end service level agreements for burgeoning, bandwidth-intensive services such as carrier Ethernet and IPTV.

The cornerstone of that new architecture is a new software-based product, the Lucent Resource Manager. The LRM communicates with various network elements to not just enforce end-to-end QoS but also ensure what Lucent calls “quality of experience” for the end user--meaning not only tightening up latency and jitter but also response times to user commands.

“That’s the secret sauce that creates the service architecture,” said John Marinho, Lucent’s corporate strategic marketing vice president.

Another new product Lucent announced this week, the new Universal Packet Mux (UPM), is a converged optical/packet-based core transport platform that combines support for wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM), time-division multiplexing and packet-based traffic. Using 40-Gb/s interfaces, the platform has a total wire-speed packet-switching capacity of 280 Gb/s.

Lucent says the UPM is well-suited for distributing WDM-based video, switching and aggregating Ethernet service traffic and backhauling wireless traffic that is evolving from TDM to IP and Ethernet.

The vendor will allow carriers to start testing the UPM this fall and make it generally available early next year.