UBS Warburg on new CSCO offerings-- (and Ironbridge goes belly up)
UBS Warburg - Wall Street Tech
________________________________________________________________________
ANALYSIS OF THE CURRENT CORE IP ROUTERS
Summary:
This morning Cisco officially announced general availability of their highly
anticipated new core router chassises as well as an OC-192c line card. The
company's press release indicates that at least 3 customers: Sprint, AOL,
and 360 Networks will be involved in the initial deployment of the new
products. We believe that Sprint is most likely the flagship customer.
During the Sprint analyst meeting last fall, the company mentioned that they
would be building out their network to OC-192 speeds and Sprint is not a
Juniper customer either. With today's news, Cisco becomes the 3rd vendor
following Juniper and Avici who have announced support for OC-192c line
cards. We have been writing that Cisco was targeting introduction of these
products during 1Q01, so today's news is basically in line with
expectations.
Highlights:
Two new core router chassises were introduced by Cisco (CSCO-$38.50-Buy)
today, a 10 slot version (GSR 12410) and a 16 slot version (GSR 12416) for
use with the new line cards. The two new line cards are an OC-192c (10Gb/s)
and a quad OC-48c line card. These new line cards involved the design of 9
new ASICs. Each line card also has on it a packet-forwarding engine capable
of forwarding packets at 25Mpps. In addition, Cisco is also offering
customers who have the older GSR 12016 an upgrade path to migrate the 80Gb/s
switching fabric to the new 320Gb/s fabric so that the older chassis can
utilize the new OC-192c line cards. However, the GSR 12008 and 12012 are not
upgradable for use with the new OC-192c line cards. We believe that some of
the new routers are deployed today and are running live traffic across them.
We also believe that customers have successfully performed the 320Gb/s
upgrade.
Cisco has been aggressively marketing their next generation core router with
OC-192c line card support since the late fall of 2000. As a review, Juniper
has been shipping a core router chassis with support for OC-192c line cards
since March-2000 and Avici announced OC-192c line card support three weeks
ago. During this time, Juniper (JNPR-$114.25-Buy) has been able to announce
deployments of their OC-192c line cards and M160 chassis into major networks
including: UUNET, Cable & Wireless, Qwest, Genuity, MFN, and Star21
(Germany). Avici (AVCI-$35.75-Buy) has also announced testing of their
OC-192c line card at AT&T.
Today's product news provides Cisco with one opportunity of stemming further
market share losses to Juniper, now that the key 10Gb/s product support is
available on the GSR. Announcement by Cisco, the market leader, of a key
product feature (10Gb/s) that lagged competitor's offerings, further product feature (10Gb/s) that lagged competitor's offerings, further
validates the high barriers to entry that exist for any one vendor to enter
the core router market. As further proof of the high barriers to entry,
IronBridge Networks, another privately held startup which was working on a
core router was reported by the Boston Globe to have laid off all but 20
employees and was looking to sell its intellectual property.
In terms of what we continue to look for in new products, we expect the next
router from Juniper to be a M320, which would effectively double the
capacity for OC-192c line card support. We also expect this platform to form
a basis for future upgrades to terabit class routing. With Cisco's
introduction of the GSR 12400 series core routers, Juniper will trail both
Avici and Cisco in total number of OC-192c line cards supported. We also
expect to hear of additional lower-speed line card support such as DS-3 and
gigabit ethernet from Avici during 1H01. In a related press release today,
Qwest announced that all three vendors: Cisco, Juniper and Avici were being
evaluated for Terabit router solutions. To date, Avici remains the only
publicly announced vendor field
trialing a Terabit router with Qwest. As mentioned during their quarterly
conference call 2 weeks ago, the expectation was that it would require 4-6
months of testing before Qwest would make any conclusions on the product.
Analysis:
Current Core IP Routers offered Today
CSCO12410 CSCO 12416 JNPR M160 AVCI TSR
Switch Fabric 200Gb/s 320Gb/s 160Gb/s 400GB/s
Slots 10 16 8 40
PktFwd(per slot)25Mpps 25Mpps 20Mpps 25Mpps
Maximum Port Configurations per Chassis
CSCO 12410 CSCO 12416 JNPR M160 AVCI TSR
OC-192c POS 9 15 8 20
OC-48c POS 36 60 32 80
OC-12c POS 36 60 128 160
OC-3c POS 144 240 128 160
DS-3 108 180 128 -
T-1 - - 128 -
Chann. DS-3 1,512 T1's 15,120 T1's 896 T1's -
Chann. OC-12 108 DS-3's 180 DS-3's 384 DS-3's -
Gigabit Ether 9 15 64 -
Fast Ethernet 72 120 128 -
________________________________________________________________________ |
