To help service providers manage the exploding demand for bandwidth, Tellabs (Nasdaq: TLAB) today announced the industry's largest intelligent optical switch, with enough capacity to carry 80 million simultaneous Internet calls.

The TITAN 6700 optical switch enables carriers to manage more than 10 terabits of traffic in its initial release and will grow with carriers' demands to manage transparent wavelengths in a future release.

Located in the core of the network, the TITAN 6700 optical switch serves as the foundation of next-generation, large-scale intelligent optical networks--providing any-to-any network service delivery. Along with wavelength management, the TITAN 6700 optical switch enables carriers to connect, aggregate, protect, restore and switch traffic through their core transport backbone with efficiencies and capacity required by next-generation networks.

"Service providers are working to reliably meet the burgeoning demand for bandwidth, and optical switches are critical to managing and provisioning lightpaths in the network," said Chris Nicoll, vice president of Current Analysis. "Tellabs' TITAN 6700 sets the standard for scalability, far surpassing existing products in this class."

In its initial release the TITAN 6700 optical switch has the ability to function in both synchronous optical networks (SONET) networks as well as synchronous digital hierarchy SDH networks. By building intelligence into the switch, Tellabs enables carriers to speed their service delivery times, deliver new services and ultimately lower their operating costs.

"The TITAN 6700 Optical Switch will play a key role in enhancing current ring-based networks and helping carriers migrate to dynamic mesh-based networks," said Robert Pullen, vice president and general manager of Tellabs' Optical Networking Group. "Network protection and restoration rely on optical switches that can manage all network types--ring, mesh or point-to-point from a single, efficient operating system."

Field trials for the TITAN 6700 optical switch are expected to begin in second quarter 2001 with availability in the fourth quarter of 2001.