Jay Rolls, Cox senior vice president of technology, said the Cox network already has about 100 ASR 9000s installed. “We like to hear that a product line isn’t at end-of-life. We’re in negotiations to double our raw fiber and our national footprint over the coming year or two to meet all of this demand coming at us,” he said.
Cisco’s announcements may be a reflection of its new “back to basics” plan to focus more on its networking roots and win back Wall Street approval, a plan that has resulted in jettisoning the Flip camera and social media publishing software in recent weeks. Time will tell if Cisco can regain market share on the edge, where ACG says Cisco competitor Alcatel-Lucent grew its market share significantly in 2010. Beyond a return to networking basics are questions about whether hardware and software can even address operators’ service layer challenges.
“This announcement goes toward unifying their edge strategy, and you get management, virtualization and the ability to scale, so it’s a pretty significant launch for Cisco,” said Glen Hunt, principal analyst at Current Analysis. “Especially for cable companies that have deployed DOCSIS3, they’re now in a position where they can actually offer more telecom services, so it opens a door for them, and capacity is an issue.”
Cisco’s ASR 9000 edge router upgrade details
As with most technology announcements of this kind, it can be difficult to assess what really got announced. Here’s a summary:
Cisco is expanding the ASR 9000 Series to include the ASR 9000v, which will sit in the network aggregation layer for Ethernet aggregation. The 9000v is already available, and Cisco says operators can use its new nV technology to manage 1,920 boxes as if they were one single device. Surya Panditi, senior vice president of Cisco’s core technology group, compared the 9000v to a bank ATM that can be deployed quickly to enable expansion.
Cisco is also launching a new ASR 9922 edge router (available in the first half of 2012) for more capacity. When added to other ASR 9000 gear, Cisco claims it will produce a 96 terabits-per-second system.
Cisco’s nV technology can be added to existing ASR 9000 Series products, according to Pankaj Patel, Cisco's senior vice president of engineering, and it will enable network operators to manage operations from a single interface.
Cisco is also adding two new Ethernet line cards to the ASR 9000 line—one with two ports of 100 gigabits-per-second and one with 24 ports of 10 gigabits-per-second.