Although it consumes more energy than the Cat 6509s, he said, the Cisco ASR 9000 consumes less energy per port, and each POP needs only two of the edge routers to meet bandwidth demands from rapid IP traffic growth.
The rollout of Cisco ASR 9000s across NTT America's 11 POPs will be gradual. As Catalyst 6509s get decommissioned from some facilities, they will be repurposed at POPs getting refreshed later to temporarily boost capacity at those sites, Junkins said.
"They're shipping today the density of 10-gig ports that we really needed in order to be able to keep growing our network without holding up our installs for customers," he said. "It brings the capacity in line with the [IP traffic growth] we saw."
It's a problem all carriers will face as IP traffic growth outpaces the capacity of their legacy infrastructure, according to Greg G. Smith, a marketing manager within Cisco's service provider unit. At peak capacity, the Cisco ASR 9000 is capable of 6.4 Tbps, he said.
"[Older equipment] was sufficient for them when [carriers] didn't need as much capacity, but now you've got a lot more services," Smith said. "Ten years ago, you didn't necessarily have people running voice and video on-demand … on a single IP infrastructure. There's an almost insatiable demand for greater connectivity."
Junkins predicts it won't be long before 100 Gbps networks become the norm for the Internet backbone. But meeting that demand would have been unrealistic -- financially and logistically -- with the switches NTT America was using in its edge network last year, he said.
This article originally appeared on SearchTelecom.com