Product of the Month. Siemens/NN Introduces 36140 and 36144 Multiservice ATM Access Switches for the Network Edge
telecoms-mag.com
May 1998
Multiservice access switches enjoy a special place in the sun right now.
Demand is strong as carriers and enterprise customers alike seek to grow
their businesses. The strategy? To bring several different kinds of traffic
and protocols into one multiservice platform at the network edge, and
then backhaul that traffic to the ATM core at high speed. With this kind
of flexibility, service providers can roll out all kinds of services quickly,
easily, and cheaply without having to worry about installing new nodes,
purchasing parallel equipment for each protocol, and committing to one
particular service.
This brings us to the Siemens / Newbridge MainStreet Xpress 36140
and 36144. Designed for both the customer premise and carrier access
environments, the 36140 and 36144 Multiservice ATM access switches
(with 11 and 5 slots, respectively) consolidate ATM, leased line, frame
relay (particularly important, since most backhauled traffic is frame relay),
switched multimegabit data services data exchange interface (SMDS
DXI), voice, and LAN traffic. With 2 Gbps of non-blocking throughput
and full redundancy for high availability, these boxes are designed for
carrier-class performance. Though not industry highs, they support up to
80 T1s, 30,000 simultaneous connections, and high-speed OC-3
trunking. The usual suspects--CBR, rt-VBR, nrt-VBR, ABR, UBR, and
shaped UBR--are all spoken here, with enhanced traffic shaping for
bursty UBR traffic. Though several interfaces, such as IP and voice with
compression, are not included in the initial release, the vendors plan to
make interface cards available in Q2 98.
"Newbridge is the worldwide ATM backbone market share leader with
over 2200 36170 ATM switches installed in over 200 carriers," said
George Hunt, the director and principal WAN equipment analyst at
Dataquest (San Jose, Calif.). "Being the installed ATM backbone vendor
is a big advantage. Newbridge can now offer a complete end-to-end
ATM product line. With a 2-Gbps backplane, OC-3 trunking, and
support for voice, data, and LAN interfaces, the 36140 is a competitive
ATM access product which fits in well with the Newbridge MainStreet
product line."
In keeping with carrier-class requirements, the platforms perform traffic
shaping and circuit emulation. Rounding out the feature set are a software
upgradable routing architecture; SNMP management; hot-swappable
service cards; and F4 and F5 OAM features, including alarm indication,
ATM loopback, continuity checking, and performance monitoring. Each
interface can provide both service interworking and networking as well.
"Service providers should be looking at the economies that a multiservice
layer gives them and evaluating the benefits of these access switches that
can handle multiple services on a single platform," said Cathy Gadecki,
senior broadband consultant with TeleChoice (Verona, N.J.). "These
benefits include some powerful enticements: Unit cost is lower, and
providers can process the investment with one service but then roll out
many off of it. The Siemens / Newbridge platform with its frame relay,
LAN, circuit emulation, and ATM interfaces offers four critical service
opportunities to CLECs."
Currently available, the Siemens / Newbridge Alliance 36140 is $17,000
and the 36144 starts at $11,000, depending on configuration. For more
information, visit the companies' Web sites at www.siemens.com or
www.newbridge.com.
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