Terabit Races To Carriers' Rescue (From Internet Week)
Saroja Girishankar
If ISPs and carriers are having panic attacks about offering Internet
access, there's good reason.
Insatiable demand for Internet access from businesses and consumers has
ISPs and carriers scrambling to keep up. Their biggest worry is how to
prevent bandwidth bottlenecks caused by mushrooming extranets and
intranets that constantly threaten to choke the global Internet.
Help is on the way this year, however, as an ambitious pack of start-ups
develop switches and routers that can handle hundreds of millions-and in
the long run, even terabits-of packets per second. These heavy-duty
networking devices are primarily being built by fast-moving newcomers
such as Avici Systems Inc., Argon Networks Inc. (formerly called
GigaPacket Networks Inc.) and NeoNet LLC. They're betting that the
market is ripe for their high-end offerings, and they're right.
"ISPs need high-capacity routers for their backbone to meet their
demands, and terabit routers will fill that hole," says Surya Panditi,
Avici's president and CEO.
ISPs could not agree more.
Uunet Technologies Inc., the ISP arm of WorldCom, faces the daunting
task of merging its network with that of MCI once WorldCom's acquisition
of MCI becomes final. The result will be the world's largest Internet
service provider with some 500,000 routers and 3,000 points of presence.
This would also mean having industrial-strength routers and switches
capable of handling terabit packets per second.
"We need next-generation products that can handle the increasing demand
for reliable and wire-speed Internet services and that can handle OC-48
kind of speeds," says Michael O'Dell, vice president and chief scientist
at Uunet.
Though O'Dell says he could use the products in the next six months,
he'll have to wait-along with everyone else-until products are mature
and well tested later this year.
Most products will not be formally announced and displayed until
midyear, though some early betas could begin in the first and second
quarters, vendors say. General availability could begin late in the
year.
Mega-Routers
Key to these forthcoming devices-some of which are mega-IP routers, and
others a combination of ATM switches with built-in routing
functionality-is their ability to pump steady streams of small packets
at wire speeds. Use of advanced ASICs lets the switch-routers process 1
million packets per second of multimedia throughput. The ASICs are being
tested now by Argon Networks using its proprietary technology.
Further, many of these devices will be able to synthesize capabilities
of routers, ATM and frame switches, and handle advanced automated
mapping of IP addresses to those switches. In particular, they will
integrate multiple services-multimedia over IP, voice over ATM and
virtual private networks-while providing security.
Panditi and others expect these products to provide several levels of
quality-of-service and class-of-service guarantees to ensure some level
of consistency for customers. They will have to be scalable to handle
ever-expanding Internet and resulting services, whether they are as
simple as fax over the Internet or electronic commerce applications. WAN
links in the OC-12, OC-48 and even OC-192 range reaching 9.6-Gbps speeds
will be standard offerings.
Frank Dzubeck, president of Communications Network Architects Inc., sees
these products meeting ISP demand for tera-packet switches and from
carriers that need ATM-based switches for integrating their voice and
data networks. Though he was optimistic about the developments, he
predicts that rollouts will be late in the year at best.
In the meantime, service providers and carriers will look to existing
vendors, such as Cisco and Ascend Communications Inc., for immediate
solutions. Both Ascend's GRF 1600 IP router and Cisco's Gigabit Switch
Router 12000 will process up to 10 million packets per second, a far cry
from the 200 million packets being promised by the start-ups. But when
the heat is on, availability wins out.
Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc. |
