Cisco unveiled its Routed Optical Networking offering, leveraging optics from its Acacia acquisition and its Silicon One chip architecture, and announced a new broadband network gateway for wireline telcos at the Cisco Live! Event this week.
The announcements, which was positioned by Cisco as an infrastructure "redesign," are the latest steps in filling out the vendor’s Converged SDN Transport blueprint for enabling service providers to collapse converge multiple IP and optical networks into a common, cost-efficient, secure and scalable network infrastructure. It’s also all part of Cisco’s “Internet for the Future” strategy.
The company said its Routed Optical Networking solution uses Acacia’s pluggable coherent optics, advancements in Segment Routing and Ethernet VPN, and new Cisco Crosswork Cloud capabilities to allow operators to meet the requirements to support an expected boom in network traffic to be generated by 5G. The announcement comes about two months after Cisco cleared the last regulatory hurdles to its $4.5 billion Acacia deal, which involved more than a year of negotiations and legal challenges that eventually led to an much-increased price for the acquisition.
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As part of this week’s announcement, Cisco said its 8000 series of routers now features Cisco Silicon One Q200 series chips offering up to 14.4 Tbps total capacity. It also unveiled new line cards and a new chassis for the Cisco Aggregated Service Router (ASR) 9000 series and Network Convergence System (NCS) 500 and 5500 series routers. Also, the company said its new Crosswork Network Controller (CNC) features help customers operate the Cisco Routed Optical Networking solution.
Cisco also is introducing its new Cisco Cloud Native Broadband Network Gateway for wireline telcos, a product which joins the family of existing gateways designed for cable TV and mobile operators. The cloud-native gateway will allow wireline operators to migrate to a more unified subscriber management model that can help them offer access-agnostic services independent from where people use these services, the company said.
In addition to these unveilings, Cisco also said its Crosswork Cloud will include a new application called Traffic Analysis that offers service provider comprehensive visibility across network peering points, as well as actionable recommendations for optimizing traffic at the network edge to help prevent impact on the customer experience.
Cisco has worked closely with several network operators on its “Internet for the Future” strategy, including Airtel, Altibox, Eolo, Facebook, Google Cloud, Rakuten Mobile, SFR, Telenor, Telia Carrier, Telstra, Websprix and others, the company said.
As part of this week’s announcements, Mattias Fridström, Chief Evangelist, Telia Carrier, said in a statement, “Historically, building and operating a multi-layer architecture has always been a challenge. Thanks to game-changing innovations that span across silicon, routing systems and standardized 400G coherent pluggable optics, complex layers can finally converge into a simpler and more scalable architecture with evolving cost structures and efficiencies. Telia Carrier has spearheaded this transition leveraging building blocks such as the Cisco 8000 and NCS 5700, resulting in a network that is easier to maintain, faster to adapt and cheaper to operate. We expect communication service providers to aggressively transition existing metro and long-haul networks in the coming year.”