Alcatel-Lucent brings its first 100GB router to the edge

Alcatel-Lucent has announced its first 100GB edge router card range, to be available in mid 2010.

The forthcoming 7750 Service Router (SR) and 7450 Ethernet Service Switch (ESS) will have 100GB capability that will be backwards compatible with the company's service routers supplied since 2004.

The company joins Juniper in announcing commercially available 100GB network hardware. Although final certification of the technology won't come until 2010 networking vendors are already lining up to meet growth in the mobile data market.

“Traffic keeps growing, but service providers need to make money. For this, they not only need higher speeds and capacities, but they need service flexibility at the same time,” stated Michael Howard, principal analyst at Infonetics Research.

“We’re encouraged to see Alcatel-Lucent support 100 Gigabit Ethernet with services enablement for the edge and the metro, as well as high-speed transport in the core.”

The new hardware will carry the company's FP2 silicon, a 90nm chipset using 112 array cores to get 95,000 million instructions per second (MIPS), while keeping power consumption below four watts per gigabit.

“Delivering higher performance networks and reducing power consumption per bit is essential to meeting the needs of service providers worldwide. It’s these capabilities which enable service providers to generate more revenue from their networks,” said Basil Alwan, president of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP activities.

“This is a fully converged, scalable, next generation, all-IP multiservice infrastructure that enables operators to deliver traffic more reliably, efficiently and at the lowest cost, while also leveraging the network to generate revenue from sophisticated managed services and applications.”