With the ever-increasing need for bandwidth, providers need not only faster pipes but faster gear at their central backbones to handle it all. Fast pipes are worthless if the central office is a bottleneck. Now Alcatel-Lucent has a tremendously fast switch, and
Enterprise Networking Planet has the details.
As demand for bandwidth continues to grow, so too do the demands on carrier backbones to deliver. One solution to the problem is providing hardware platforms that have more capacity, which is what Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) is doing with its new 1870 Transport Tera Switch (TTS) optical core switching platform.
The 1870 TTS provides four terabits per second of switching capacity with its initial release, with the potential to eventually scale as high as 8Tb per second.
The new release is part of Alcatel-Lucent’s plan, first laid out in September 2009, to help converge the optical transport and IP layers of modern carrier networks.
“The 1870 TTS adds performance based on the capacity of the 4Tb switching platform, which helps to manage all the bandwidth that comes on a fiber that is fully loaded,” Alberto Valsecchi, vice president of marketing in Alcatel-Lucent’s Optics unit, told InternetNews.com. “It also brings the universal switching capability to manage any type of traffic from TDM to packet to OTN, providing a very high level of flexibility to the system.”