PMC-Sierra releases EPON chipsets for Chinese market

PMC-Sierra today announced EPON chipsets for broadband access in China. These chipsets support bandwidth allocation algorithms (DBAs) defined by China Telecom and also support encryption and authentication requirements of the Chinese government.

Teknovus too has customers in the Chinese market, but they do not have any specific chipsets for China. Can canybody comment on how the encryption requirements in China are supported by Teknovus?

KDDI Deploying Teknovus TK3714 Turbo EPON ONU

Teknovus yesterday announced that its TK3714 Turbo EPON ONU will be deployed by KDDI in Japan. The TK3714 Turbo ONU can be configured to run in the standardized 1 Gbps mode of IEEE 802.3ah as well as an enhanced 2.5 Gbps mode. This is Teknovus' solution to match the GPON line rate.

One of the great features of the Teknovus chipset is the great amount of features and configuration options it provides, which may be handy for delivering advanced triple play services over an access network and managing a wide range of negotiated Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with different customers.

The big effort for 100 Gig Ethernet

Ever since the IEEE formally announced its commitment to a standard for 100 Gig Ethernet in its previous plenary at Dallas, there has been a remarkable news and discussion forum coverage on this topic. That is great marketing for 100 Gig Ethernet.

So what will be the key for this technology. I believe that the price/performance ratio is the key. It is interesting that 100 GigE does not mean 100 Gbps on one wavelength (or line). For now all it means is 100 Gbps available on an end-to-end Ethernet connection. This could be in combination of 10 channels of 10 Gbps. Optical fiber systems have supported such bandwidths for years, a typical fiber can carry 160 DWDM wavelengths at OC-192 (10 Gbps). But this is confined to backbone networks where hundreds of connections have been multiplexed. The challenge is in delivering this bandwidth to an adapter.

And even if this bandwidth is delivered, will the edge device (end system) the adapter is connected to be able to make use of such high bandwidths. This has already been a major hurdle for 10 Gig adapters.

So it will be interesting to see how this technology develops and matures.

Chelsio Unified Wire Technology

Chelsio has released an excellent whitepaper describing the Terminator 3(T3) architecture used in the latest version of Chelsio's 10 Gig Ethernet adapters.

In a press release today, they have advocated the idea of Unified Wire Technology, tp replace disparate fabric technologies such as Fibre Channel and InfiniBand with 10 Gig Ethernet. Chelsio also released three new product lines based on the Terminator technology.

Chelsio's products are on demonstration at the Chelsio booth at Supercomputing 2006, Tampa Bay, Florida.

100 Gig Ethernet demonstration at Supercomputing 2006

100 Gig Ethernet is on demonstration at the Supercomputing Conference 2006 at Tampa, Florida. A 100 GbE signal is transmitted from Tampa, Florida to Houston, Texas, and back again, over ten 10 Gb/s channels using an Infinera-proposed specification for 100 GbE across multiple links through the Level 3 network. This is the first time a 100 GbE signal has been successfully transmitted through a live production network. The 100 GbE system will be on display from November 14th to the 16th at the Infinera booth (Booth no. 1157).

Cisco to buy Greenfield Networks

Cisco is buying Greenfield Networks in an attempt to boost its metro ethernet product line. Greenfield develops switches with advanced Ethernet packet processing capabilities to deliver enhanced services over Ethernet in a metro ethernet network. Greenfield is one of the hot startups in this area, having Huawei-3Com and Fujitsu as customers.

Voltaire switch to add 10 Gig E ports

Voltaire's 96-port and 288-port Grid Director switches which are used for networking using Infiniband will also support ports for 10 Gig Ethernet. This is very interesting as it shows that traditional manufacturers of high speed networking technologies are gradually accepting 10 Gig Ethernet technology.

MEF to discuss Ethernet Network-Netwrok Interface standard

LightReading reports that the Ethernet network-to-network interface (E-NNI), describing how networks will hand off Ethernet services to one another, will be among the topics pursued at the quarterly MEF meeting today.

The above standard is required so that carriers can easily interface with local area and access networks to deliver Ethernet frames and thereby services to customers. At present, there is no standard and therefore carriers are implementing custom solutions. Since there is fierce competition and lack of partnership between carriers, the issue of standardization may be more complex this time.

Custom Search on Ethernet

Last week Google introduced the Custom Search Engine (see related blog at Google). The idea is to allow users to create tightly coupled search engines related to their website or their blog.

I tried to implement one for this blog, and so here it is. And it works great actually. Try searching for the keyword 'ofc' (standing for the Optical Fiber Communication Conference) on Google. What you get is a wide assortment of links, as ofc can stand for just about anything. Now try it on the search in this blog. Bingo! All the results are related to the conference OFC. Now, you can further refine the results by intelligent topics, lets say by 'epon' (Click on link epon), which gives results relevant to epon for OFC. Similarly try the topic 'Carrier Ethernet'. Aint it great?

But sure there is scope for further improvement. Thats why Google allows volunteers to refine the search further. Interested in helping out? E-mail me, or leave a comment here, and I will invite you to modify the search engine.

Ethernet Expo 2006

LightReading held its third annual get-together of ethernet service providers, and equipment manufacturers at New York last week. This seems to be emerging as a major event in terms of industrial exhibits, coming clsoe to Optical Fiber Communications Conference and SuperComputing Conference in terms of exhibit participation. A summary article is available at the Lightreading site here.

Marvell partners with Israel based EZChip for Carrier Ethernet solutions

Marvell will partner with EZChip to develop solutions that will feature enhanced capabilities, such as advanced Carrier Ethernet class traffic management and the programmability to support new Carrier Ethernet standards, protocols and flexible services. This will enable developers of Metro Ethernet switching and routing platforms to provide complete end-to-end solutions for next generation IP networks and Triple Play services in their products.

The press release is available here.

Verizon Expands Ethernet Private Network Footprint

Verizon is going to expand its Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPL) service to Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan to add to the existing EVPL service to 10 countries in Europe. This shows the growing business of carrier ethernet.

The EVPL provides a point-to-point virtual LAN with dedicated Wide Area Network capacity that can be used to connect multiple locations and is predominantly aimed at large corporations. It features the simplicity of Ethernet connectivity plus flexibility, bandwidth granularity and stringent Service Level Agreements.

Juniper releases MX960 for Carrier Ethernet

As was reported last week, Juniper Networks expectedly introduced its MX960 Ethernet Service Router for Carrier Ethernet services with 960 Gbps of routing and switching capacity (twelve 40 Gbps slots or 48 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet. It will be powered by the JUNOS operating system. Features include fully redundant hardware, separate data and control plane, graceful restart, multicast capacilities, MPLS traffic engineering, fast reroute, and multi-homing VPLS capabilities.

SilverStorm to use NetXen 10 Gig E adapters for Infiniband Cluster Switch

SilverStorm will use NetXen 10 Gig Ethernet adapters for its SilverStorm 9000 series of Multi-Protocol Fabric Directors, a high-capacity single-chassis cluster interconnect system. The flexible 9000 series platform will provide multi-protocol support using switch modules for InfiniBand SDR, InfiniBand DDR and Virtual I/O Controller modules for Fibre Channel and 10 Gig E.

Amsterdam begins deploying its Active Ethernet project

An update from the Amsterdam FTTH Active Ethernet project is available here. Cisco 7600 Series Routers and the Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Switches will be used in the deployment.

Juniper to finally roll out Ethernet Switches

According to some news reports, Juniper will roll out the MX-Series, a line of Ethernet-optimized Layer 2-3 routing switches designed for aggregation at the service-provider edge. This will be to capture some market share in the Carier Etehrnet market where Cisco and Alcatel have made major inroads in.

Hitachi selects Neterion's Adapter for Blade Server

Neterion's 10 Gig Ethernet adapter will be included in Hitachi's BladeSymphony BS1000 server blade platform. This is as part of an agreement signed last year to promote Neterion's adapters in the Japanese high end server market.

Chelsio intergrates SCSI, RDMA, TCP offload in Terminator 3 ASIC

Chelsio has released its Terminator 3 ASIC which combines NIC, iSCSI Target and Initiator, industry standard iWARP RDMA, and TOE functionalities with integrated dual 1 GbpE / 10 GbpE ports and both native PCI-Express and PCI-X 2.0 / 1.0 (266 / 133 MHz) host bus interfaces. Product specs are available here.

Chelsio claims that the T3 can deliver 10 Gbps at less than 5% CPU utilization owing to offload technology.

NetApp adds 10 Gig Ethernet support

NetApp will be adding 10 Gig Ethernet support to its higher end storage systems line. Detailed news available here. This shows the increasing penetration and acceptance of 10 Gig technology in the storage world.

Bell Labs Paper on 100 Gig Ethernet over 2000 km

An European Conference on Optical Communictaions (ECOC) paper titled "2,000-km WDM Transmission of 10 x 107-Gbit/s RZ-DQPSK" was presented by Bell Labs on Tuesday. LightReading has an interesting analysis of it here.

OAM in Career Ethernet

Related to the previous post, LightReading has another related article on how different carrier ethernet vendors are supporting OAM. Must Read...

Cisco's Ethernet Demarcation Box

LightReading has an interesting article today about Cisco releasing its first Ethernet demarcation box. A demarcation box includes Ethernet OAM to help carriers isolate faults in the network and determine if the problem is on the carrier or customer side of a connection. The demarcation box is intended to sit at the customer premises, or very close. This is an important step towards end-to-end Ethernet, because it helps carriers/service providers segment different portions of the network, and monitor them independently.

TI Demonstrates 26-Watt Power over Ethernet Controller

Texas Instruments will demonstrate a 26-watt power over Ethernet controller at the ASIS Conference in San Diego, that will allow Ethernet-powered devices, such as IP surveillance cameras, WiMAX access points and conference IP phones, to use twice as much power from a standard Ethernet cable, without the need of an AC line. To quote the press release-

TI said its 8-pin, TPS2376-H controller contains all of the features needed to develop an IEEE 802.3af-compliant powered device with safety features including a programmable, 600-mA current limit with thermal shutdown, auto-retry and fault protection.

Overview of IEEE Interim Meeting

The IEEE 802.3 interim meeting was held at Knoxville, TN from September 18-21 2006. The High Speed Ethernet (100 Gbps) study group met for the first time. Presentations made at the study group meeting are available here. The newly constituted task force for 10 Gig Ethernet PON (IEEE 802.av) also met for the first time. Presentations made at this task force meeting are available here. The summary of the meeting is available here. The main directions in which this task group will concentrate its efforts are on having higher split ratios (e.g.,64 or 128), wavelength assignment for different channels, and power budget issues.

NetXen and Force10 to jointly market 10 GigE for data centres.

NexGen and Force10 networks today annpunced an initiative to jointly market and support programs for data center managers to promote 10Gig Ethernet as the unifying technology in high-performance, flexible and scalable data centers. The featured 10Gig Ethernet-enabled products are the NetXen 10GbE NICs for blade, rack and tower servers and the Force10 Networks S2410 data center switch that provides 24 line-rate 10GbE ports.

It seems the idea here is to demonstrate that 10GbE technology is now at a breakthrough price point for widespread adoption in data centers and storage area applications.

Matisse deploying Metro Ethernet with Optical Burst Switching

Today's Lightreading report discusses Matisse Networks gearing up for higher bandwidth Metro Ethernet. Matisse is a must-watch startup as it attempts to use "Optical Burst-Switching" technology which is widely research and understood but has not been commercially exploited and deployed.

Metro networks act as a bridge between backbone Internet networks (long-haul) and the access networks (such as DSL, Cable). As bandwidths in access increase and business enterprise traffic, the bandwidth in metro networks is expected to rapidly scale up.

With increased bandwidths, the cost of maintaining dedicated circuits using Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexed (DWDM) technology is not scalable. Reconfigurable Add-Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs) were built so that circuits can be reconfigured based on traffic demand. Matisse improves this furthur by using Optical Burst Switching (OBS) Technology. In OBS a train of packets known as a burst may be routed along a path on demand. This means no circuits need be pre-provisioned, and expensive circuit transponders need not be dedicated for every single communication path. This frees up expensive capital, simplifies network design, and enables the creation of the pure packet metro aggregation networks where bandwidth shifts in real-time to where it is needed in the network.

Matisse may have a bright future. Its founders have prior experience in establishing Amber Networks and selling it to Nokia for $421 million in 2001.

One Year at Next Gen Ethernet News

Our first blog appeared on September 13, 2005. Since then the blog count now stands at 138, and our readership has improved enormously. Please comment on added topics you would like us to cover and other changes you would like to see on this website.

Neterion signs up OEM Sam Boo in Korea

Sam Boo, a distribution agent in Korea, will help Neterion intergrate its 10 GigE adapters in server and storage OEMs, developing distribution channels and creating a customer support network.

This I believe is the first foray of Neterion in the Asia Pacific.

French Operator Illiad to spend 1 Billion Euros for Active Ethernet Deployment

French operator Iliad will deploy an "active Ethernet" strategy, where each household has a dedicated fiber connection, in its planned €1 billion (US$1.27 billion) fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) rollout. The news article on LightReading may be found here.
Iliad plans to hook up 4 million buildings and serve up to 10 million customers with its fiber rollout, starting in Paris in early 2007 and then spreading to other major French cities. It will also make the network available via the "open access" network model in which the FTTH network is made available to service providers on a competitive basis.

This seems to be a big win for Active Ethernet technology in Europe. Active Ethernet has been already deployed in a smaller scale in Amsterdam. North America and Korea+Japan are inclining towards Passive Optical Network (PON) technology for FTTH.

Juniper adds Ethernet Cars to E320 Edge router

Juniper announced a series of enhancements to its E320 Broadband Services Router designed to improve the router's IPTV capabilities. This includes adding 192 Gigabit Ethernet connections or 12 10-Gbit/s Ethernet links, managing up to 128,000 sessions in total. The E320 is deployed in more than 28 networks spanning four continents, including some of the world's largest IPTV and multiplay networks, Juniper says.

With these upgrades, the E320 can handle more traffic than Cisco 10000 series and the Redback SmartEdge 800, which handle 61,500 and 48,000 subscribers, according to the respective vendors. Juniper also claims it's got better Ethernet density than either of those.

The LightReading article is available here.

Teknovus pushing hard in China

Teknovus, a vendor for EPON chipesets, today announced in a press release that their chips are being used by Chinese carriers in more than 20 cities and provinces, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Wuhan. According to Dr. Rex Naden, the CEO, a major selling factor for Teknovus in China has been its focus on delivering advanced services over EPON such as triple play services while meeting SLAs, managment of multiple traffic flows, and fulfilling strict Quality-of-Service requirements of Chinese carriers.

I am sure that China is a difficult but huge market to penetrate for EPON vendors, given that residential access traffic has been growing extremely fast in China. China has not yet adopted the IEEE 802.3ah standard. Moreover, companies which have an engineering base in China such as Immenstar, are likely to have a significant advantage for capturing the Chinese market with the advantage of having focusses local relationships.

The press release is available here.

LightReading article on 100 Gig Ethernet seminar

LightReading has an article today on the 100 Gig Ethernet seminar organized by OIDA yesterday at San Jose. It discusses the thoughts of senior personnel of Infinera, Picolight, Force10, etc.

Comments from Force 10 Chief Scientist on 10 Gig Ethernet

Here is a press release on a discussion by Force 10 VP Technology and Chief Scientist Joel Goergen on the path to 10 Gig Ethernet. An interesting observation in the article is that today, service and content providers as well as Internet exchanges are already aggregating as many as eight 10 Gigabit Ethernet links, therefore the requirement of bandwidth for 100 Gig Ethernet is almost there.

Neterion announces 10 Gig Ethernet Adapter for SGI servers

Neterion announced in a press release that it had developed the SGI 10-Gbit Ethernet Network Adapter tuned to the particular requirements of the family of SGI Altix and SGI Altix XE server, cluster and storage platforms. The press release is available here.

A city council is Australia voices its goal towards 10 Gig ethernet

An interesting article on Zdnet Australia available here about the Toowoomba Council in Australia voicing upgrade of its network to 10 Gbps.

Article on Wide Area Ethernet

A nice article discussing the prospects of metro and carrier ethernet, particularly the requirements from carriers may be found here.

Advanced services for the broadband access market

The growth of the broadband access market (that technologies such as 1/10 Gig Ethernet PON) cater to strong depends on the demand and popularity of advanced Internet services. The most popular and discussed service is TV/Video on Demand.

I am a huge fan of the on-Demand technology. My cable provider Comcast now provides select movies which can be ordered on demand. Some of them are free, but the free ones are usually the old classical movies. I guess Comcast would like to have every movie in its repository, but alas, the cable doesnt have enough bandwidth to meet the on demand request from every customer. So they hope that given the limited collection, only a small subset of its user base will request on-demand at a given time, by which they can afford to deliver this service over the limited bandwidth available.

More than video, I would like to have sports matches on demand. Tennis is my favorite sport. The US Open Series is on. However, ESPN telecasts only the one of the semi-finals and the finals live. However, all matches are recorded by television cameras. Wouldn't it be fun to have access to all matches live, so that I can watch whichever player I am a fan of, wherever he/she is playing.

So how about Video on demand technology. Ethernet PON technology is mature, although not yet vastly deployed. Video technology is mature. So the question is when can the two be integrated to make a commercially viable venture.

And we are not far away from this technology revolution. Today, Cisco bought Video-on-Demand server venfor Arroyo for $92 million. Last month, Motorola bought Arroyo's comeptitor for $186 million. The big players now see juice in this market. Which is great, because now the millions of dollars required for an intensive marketing effort to promote the technology and make it available to the masses so that it can be cheap and commerically viable is available.

And that is a huge developement for EPON chip vendors. For device technology matures very fast. But it takes services and software to catch up. Device vendors have to hinge their bets on this factor. So Cisco and Motorola taking keen interest in the video server market ought to be great news for Teknovus, PMC-Sierra, Immenstar and the others.

OIDA Workshop on 100 Gig Etehrnet

The OptoElectronics Industrial Development Association (OIDA) is holding a one day meeting to understand 100 Gig Ethernet and provide a forum for the systems vendors, router vendors and component companies to address this. Details are available here. The Ethernet Alliance today announced that it will have representation at this workshop.

IEEE 802.3 Interim session

The IEEE 802.3 has posted its next interim meeting to be at Knoxville, TN from September 18-21 2006. The agenda of the meeting may be found here.

FTTx market growing strongly

LightReading today has an excellent report mentioning remarkable growth in the FTTx market as carriers expand on optical access deployments to accomodate IPTV and triple play. The number of fiber based access network subscriptions is expected to grow to $125 million, the report says. FTTH shippents have risen by 245% in the past year, the majority being from Japan.

This should be sweet news for the Ethernet PON vendors: Teknovus, PMC-Sierra, Immenstar , and the others.

10 Gig Ethernet Switch Revenues Soar according to report

A recently published report from Dell'Oro Group, (press release available here), reveals sales of close to $300 million in the second quarter of 2006. Cisco leads followed by Force10, Foundry and then Nortel.

Upscale 10 Gig Ethernet switch from Fujitsu

Apparently Fujitsu is rolling out a high-end version of its 10-Gbit/second Ethernet switch with features that aim to enable lower-cost, easier-to-build backplane-based computers and telecom systems. The company claims the 20-port switch is among the first to implement the 10-Gbit/s Ethernet serial interface for direct connection to low-cost optical modules.

Related news article is available here.

Neterion optimizes its 10 Gig Ethernet adapter for Sun Fire Systems

Neterion announced the availability of its new low-profile 10 GbE card, optimized for Sun Fire platforms. With a low-profile, super-fast PCI-X bus interface, the Xframe II SF is specifically designed for the new Sun Fire systems, combining support of Solaris 10, Microsoft Windows and Red Hat and SUSE Linux in one package.

In August 2004, Sun Microsystems and Neterion agreed to partnet on the development of high-speed interconnect solution for Sun platforms.

Ciena enhance Etehrnet Internetworking on DN7000

Ciena today announced enhancements to the pseudowire emulation and advanced Ethernet interworking capabilities on its DN 7000 Series FlexSelect Multiservice Edge Switching and Aggregation Platform. In the words of Dave Parls, Ciena's senior product manager

There is a lot of frame relay, ATM and traditional TDM private lines out there. They are evolving to higher capacity services based on Ethernet and other packet technologies like IP. The enhancements allow support for legacy and interworking with Ethernet.

More details are available here.

Nice read on Carrier Ethernet

A nice articke describing some of the challanges that Carrier Ethernet faces is available here. A chief issue cited is interoperatability concerns. Particularly, thd development of end-to-end Ethernet is extremely importanat towards this goal.

Fujitsu releases 20 port 10 Gig Switch

Fujitsu has released MB8AA3020, its 20-port 10GbE switch chip delivering 400+Gbps, non-blocking, aggregate switching bandwidth through 3Mbytes of multi-stream shared buffer memory.
An on-chip micro-engine drives the management interface. The IC also supports the CX4 interface and adaptive equalisation with on-chip SerDes. Fujitsu's switch chip embeds 20 high-bandwidth, full-duplex 10Gbps ports in a single, integrated 1,156-pin FCBGA package.

Ethernet over Copper article

Nice article on LightReading, which analysis the Ethernet over Copper Midband service being provided by BellSouth, and how other RBOCs are planning to come in terms with it.

AMCC to acquire Quake

Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC) today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Quake Technologies. Quake is a privately-held fabless semiconductor company that is the leading vendor of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) PHY technology. Quake was recently in the news for its technology to reduce the cost of 10 Gig.

Lower prices boosting 10 Gig Ethernet according to HeavyReading

The 10-Gbit/s Ethernet market could be poised for a growth spurt, as prices are getting down to the critical level to kick up some serious demand, according to the latest Heavy Reading report, available at here. The LightReading report discussing the same is available here.

It notes that the chip technology prices are one-tenth what they were in the first generation of 10-Gbit/s Ethernet which has helped boost the volume of 10 Gig Ethernet sales. Modules are lowering systems prices by getting smaller. The industry started with the 300-pin multisource agreement (MSA) and has been moving through smaller module generations since -- to Xenpak, then X2, and eventually XFP. Vendors are already working on the next step beyond the XFP transceiver, called SFP+.

Prices for 10-Gbit/s ports have recently dropped to less than $10,000 per uplink -- which, with 48-port switches on the market, translates to less than $200 per user.

Bellsouth using Hettheras equipment for 45 Mbps Ethernet over Copper

BellSouth will use Hatteras Networks Ethernet service edge platform to deliver up to 45 Mbps of symmetrical Ethernet service over copper. It is expected BellSouth to move its business outside its normal customer base by delivering leased Etehrnet lines on copper, and thus have small businesses as their customers.

10 Gig Ethernet High Priority for Enterprises according to TheInfoPro

10 Gig Ethernet technology has emerged in TheInfoPro's most recent studies as a top priority among networking professionals for 2006, based on hundreds of one-on-one interviews with networking decision makers. The technology is considered to be important across many domains inside the IT organization due in large part to data center consolidation, server virtualization and potentially networked storage. Some results of the study are availebale here.

Update from IEEE 802.3 Plenary last week

The IEEE 802.3 plenary was help last week (July 16-21) at San Diego. A brief update on some of the important achievments at the meeting:

1) A proposal to study higher speed Ethernet (beyong 10 Gig and possibly 40 Gig or 100 Gig) was voted and accepted. A lightreading report on the same is available here. The report mentions that a standard may be expected in 3 years from now.

2) The Project Authorization Request (PAR) and Five Criteria Responses submitted by the 10 Gig Ethernet PON study group has been accepted. The next step is for the standards board to approve the creation of a task force, which if created is expected to meet in September (Date and Venue to be decided).

Quake signal processing technology to reduce 10 Gig Ethernet cost

Quake Technologies today announced the availability of the QT2035S, an integrated physical layer IC for all 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) applications. To quote Mitch Kahn, Quake's vice president of marketing:

Today, the wholesale cost for a typical XFP module for short-reach 10G Ethernet is approximately $350. Using Quake's new QT2035S and SFP+ technology, the cost of a module for this same reach can be reduced to below $100. At this new price point, 10G Ethernet becomes very compelling for a range of high-volume applications

PMC-Sierra posts weak projection on EPON growth

PMC-Sierra's stock was hit by 25% today, after it projected lesser growth in EPON revenues, one of the key technologies it had pinned its growth on. PMC-Sierra had bought Passave for $300 million last quarter. The EPON revenues in this quarter are $16 million, while the expected revenues in next quarter are $13 million.

According to a LightReading report available here, the problems seems to be from Japan, where NTT wants to use fewer Optical Line Terminals (OLTs). NTT has been deploying roughly one OLT per four subscribers but wants to use a one-to-eight ratio -- resulting in fewer OLTs in the short term. OLTs being the more expensive chipset compared to ONUs, yields better revenue and gross margins.

Passave's revenues have bounced around in the range of $10 million to $16 million per quarter for most of the past two years. So even though this past quarter was an all-time high, Passave doesn't seem to be showing the straight-line growth path investors were hoping for.

It seems that part of the problems in the slow growth of EPON is high competition (as many as three other startups: Teknovus, Immenstar, Centillium), and a very limited market in Korea and Japan. Because these chipsets are sold to equipment vendors and resellers, may lead to lesser gross margins.

Given that, the price of $300 million that PMC-Sierra paid seems to be sky high.

Alloptic Aims for Latin American Market

Alloptic announced that they have signed a reseller agreement with Datagrama Comunicaciones of Costa Rica for its EPON chipsets. Datagrama Comunicaciones serves the Central American markets with broad expertise in the telecommunications, data communications, and security markets. It is beleieved that AllOptic is targeting the Latin American market where broadband access deployments have yet to evolve.

Yankee Group Research shows Ethernet growing rapidly in Asia Pacific

According to "Big Bandwidth, Low Prices: Asia's Speed Demons Review", published by the Yankee Group, several factors are driving the boom of the Asia-Pacific wide-area Ethernet market including surging bandwidth requirements, the ability to provision bandwidth on-demand and a gradual network migration. Asia-Pacific is the second largest market after Europe in terms of revenue from Ethernet services, totaling $676.5 million in 2005. Most service providers in Asia-Pacific offer their Ethernet services over an MPLS-based IP VPN network. Although Metro Ethernet is gaining momentum in the corporate networking arena, the capability to offer enhanced manageability and service performance remains critical for service providers to stand out and win enterprise business.

Teknovus EPON chips being used by KT too

After last weeks' announcement by Dasan Networks, that its equipment with PMC-Sierra EPON chips would be deployed by Korea Telecom (KT), today Samsung announced that its FTTH equipment carrying Teknovus EPON chips would be deployed in large volumes across Korea too. So it looks like KT will be going with multiple vendors for its deployments. Korea is definitelty the next biggest EPON market after Japan, so these developments will be great for Teknovus.

Ethernet Growth to drive 10 Gig optical industry

An interesting analysist report by Communications Industry Researchers (CIR), (news analysis available here)claims that manufacturers of optical modules based on semiconductor lasers and modulators should witness a boom in demand with rapid deployment of 10 Gigabit Ethernet from 2008 onwards. According to the forecasters at Communications Industry Researchers (CIR), the main reason behind the expected boom will be the deployment of products for use in short-range 10 Gb/s applications.

Purchase details of the same report are available here.

PMC-Sierra's EPON Solution to be deployed by Dasan Networks

PMC-Sierra announced in a press release that its EPON chips would be designed into Dasan's FTTH equipment to be used by Korea Telecom (KT) for volume deployment in Korea's FTTH network rollout. KT is expected to begin volume deployments in the third quarter of this year. This seems to be a great new market, as PMC-Sierra (Passave) already carries volume deployments by NTT in Japan. Prease release is available at

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=74533&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=881130

Immenstar introduces dual mode GPON/EPON

Immenstar, which recently came out of stealth mode to introduce EPON chips has now introduced a chipset that may operate in dual GPON/EPON mode. GPON and EPON are two different blends of the Passive Optical Network (PON). They differ in the technology used to encapsulate frames, while EPON uses the Ethernet, GPON uses the Generic Framing Procedure (GFP). While EPON has the advantages of blending in easily with the universal Ethernet ports (such as in LANs), GPON currently has a higher bit-rate in current operations and better operational control mechanisms.

I am not very sure of the motivation behind a dual mode GPON/EPON chipset, since the two different technologies have been growing in different markets. While the EPON has been strongly growing in the Asia-Pacific, the GPON has been growing in North America. It also seems unlikely that an operator would like to move to a GPON solution once he has chosen to go with EPON and vice-versa. May be the benefit it is in manufacturing ease, because a single product may now cater to both markets, and thus reduce the cumulative costs of operations, compared to having two differnt product lines. Any comments from readers would be great.

BellSouth diversifies Metro Ethernet Portfolio

BellSouth announced today that it is expanding its Metro Ethernet Service to include mid-band speed options of 2Mbps, 4Mbps and 8Mbps. BellSouth Metro Ethernet Service currently offers previously available data transport speeds of 10Mbps, 20Mbps, 50Mbps, 100Mbps, 250Mbps, 500Mbps and 1000Mbps.

Article on 10 Gig Ethernet

A nice article on the importance and the future of 10 Gig Ethernet is available here. The author expects 2 milion 10 Gig Ethernet ports to be shipped in 2010, as the cost per port decreases, and the dmad of higher bandwidth in enterprises increases.

NTT Communications Global Super Link Service

NTT Communications Corporation announced that it will expand the service area for Global Super Link a virtual private network service supporting Ethernet to England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Hong Kong in addition to the U.S. and Japan.

NTT had demonstrated the performance of its service in this years Superbowl when it relayed high definition content to Japan at 70 Mbps. NTT aims to use MPLS technology and its Global IP backbone to offer secure virtual private Ethernet service with world-class network management. Enterprise users can create a global LAN environment using their existing equipment.

Read more news in this article.

Cisco integrating Ethernet with Infiniband for HiPC

Cisco today announced that it is expanding its portfolio of solutions that support high performance computing by delivering a common framework which will integrate Ethernet and InfiniBand, end-to-end management software, and a new InfiniBand switching platform and operating system software. The solution will integrate the Cisco SFS 7000D Series InfiniBand DDR switches with the above features, to simplify the deployment of clusters.

It is interesting to observe these two technologies which were developed parallely and competed with each other, now being supported together by multiple vendors.

Scintera raises $12 million Series C funding

Scintera develops electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) technology for 10 Gigabit Ethernet signal processing, thus positioning itself well with the 802.3aq standard due later this year. The new 10-Gigabit Ethernet PHY is designed to enable the development of serial transceivers that will support 10-Gbit/sec transmission over 220 m of legacy multimode fiber.

This post marks the 100th post at http://ethnews.blogspot.com On this occasiion, I would like to thank all the readers and contributers for a successful endeavour.

Narad releases Ethernet switch for 100 Mbps access over cable networks

Narad Networks, a provider of Ethernet switches for broadband access solutions, today unveiled a new modular switch product line capable of delivering 100 Mbps service simultaneously to each and every home on a cable operator's network. The new modular Ethernet switch can be deployed in a variety of configurations for various commercial and residential requirements. Narad claims that its solution has electronics costs loosely the equivalent of Passive Optical Network (PON), but has far less fiber deployment cost.

EPON a key enabler for IPTV

An excellent article highlighting the expected growth in Fiber To The Home (FTTH) and EPON technology is available at:

http://www.viodi.com/newsletter/060600/article1.htm

Market projections indicate that the customer base of fiber to the home connections will increase to 86 million by 2010, with the bulk of growth coming from the Asia-Pacific. For example, Japan is expected to have 30 million connections alone. NTT is currently deploying 100,000 new FTTH connections per month.

Chelsio raises $12 Million

Chelsio announced that it had raised $12 million Series D Venture Capital funding. Chelsio also announced that it had LSI Logic as an investor. The president and CEO of Chelsio Kianoosh Naghshineh mentioned that this funding with help Chelsio build its next generation Ethernet protocol offload engine, which will integrate NIC, TOE, iSCSI and RDMA functionality.

This round of funding should come as a huge relief to Chelsio, which has been struggling with increasing sales of its 10 Gig Ethernet and iSCSI technology. The big question is how much will the 10 Gig adapter market take off, given that current application is limited to cluster computing. One key area of growth may be in Storage Area Networks (SANs). SANs cuurently are limited to iSCSI technology which is limited to 1 Gig channels.

Press release is available at:
http://www.chelsio.com/newsevents/pr/pr_061906.php

10 GigE campus network in Japan!!!

Force10 Networks today announced that the University of Electro-Communications (UEC), Japan's national science and technology school, is upgrading its campus network to 10 Gigabit Ethernet as part of its e-Campus Initiative as well as to support other research and computing needs across the campus.

"With our e-learning initiative well underway, we expect that traffic on the network will grow quickly over the next couple of years, and we needed an infrastructure that could support that growth," said Masayuki Takada, assistant professor at UEC.

University campus having 10 Gig backbone. Thats astounding. The Japanese have a huge research budget, and I have heard that every Japanese undergraduate is given a laptop when he enters college, and another one after two years into his program. Comments from anyone?

10 GigE Cable to reduce crosstalk

Network cabling firm Brand-Rex has announced 10GPlus, an improved design for 10 Gigabit Ethernet cables to reduce alien crosstalk (AXT). AXT occurs due to electrical interference between cables, a problem exacerbated by the higher frequencies used to achieve 10Gbpss network transfer rates.

Article on Metro Ethernet

A nice article discussing the development in Metro Ethernet is here. The article discusses products in this space by Cisco, Nortel and Juniper. Nice read.

Nortel's Ethernet Plans

In a press release today, Nortel discussed its Ethernet plans for metro networks, including its efforts for standardization of its Provider Backbone Transport (PBT) technology. A first-to-market version of PBT is already available in the Nortel Metro Ethernet Routing Switch (MERS) 8600, with development also underway to integrate the technology into the Nortel Optical Multiservice Edge (OME) 6500 and other Ethernet-ready platforms. A detailed report is available here.

Juniper's Ethernet Cards

Lightreading reports that Juniper is bringing out Ethernet cards formally dubbed the IQ2 Ethernet Services Aggregation Physical Interface Cards (PICs) for its M- and T-series routers. This seems to be Juniper's first move into Layer 2, to match Alcatel, which already has its Series 7450 Ethernet Switching box. The complete LightReading article is available here.

Teknous supporting TDM in GEPON

Teknovus is supporting TDM services in its latest GEPON chips which will have the ability to support traditional leased-line services. The two new chips are the TK3515 for ONU applications and the high-density TK3525 for OLT applications, thus providing efficient, end-to-end support for TDM-over-Ethernet services.

I believe that this step provides an easy migration path from leased-line services vailable currently to the next generation EPON world.

10Gig EPON strudy group meeting

The 10Gig EPON Study Group website has been updated with contents of the meeting held at Austin, TX last week. The study group has voted that a Project Authorization Request (PAR) be submitted in the next IEEE Plenary Session at July.

Immenstar in Ethernet PON Market

LightReading today has an interesting article about Immenstar, a startup, joining the EPON market. Immenstar has been operating in stealth mode for over two years. LightReading also mentions that Immenstar claims to have a multimillion dollar order due next month, possibly from UTStarComm which sells equipment to Softbank BB Corp for the deployment of Yahoo Broadband Service in Japan. UTStarComm previously used Passave (acquired by PMC-Sierra) chipsets but that didnt work very well as many of Passave chips had errors. The news article is available here.

The product portfolio of Immenstar is very interesting, it offers a Quad OLT chip with integrates 4 OLT ports and 4 Gigabit Ethernet ports with Non Blocking Switching. The company website mentions that the MuLan EPON Switch Chipset provides a carrier-class Ethernet ultrabroadband access solutions for network operators and service providers. It offers quality of service, fault tolerant operating system, hot swap capability, scalability, and high density system for the EPON access network.

It is interesting to see a startup in the EPON area, as there are already a bunch of companies competing for limited marketplace. EPON seems to be growing primarily in Japan and Korea while North America seems to be moving towards the GFP-PON market. And although different EPON chipset vendors promise to deliver quality of service, technologically there doesn't seem to be anything different that Immenstar has to offer compared to existing chipsets in the marketplace.

Furukawa announces Gigabit Interface Converter (GBIC) enabled EPON ONU

Furukawa has developed a EPON ONU with a GBIC (Gigabit Interface Converter) form-factor based on Teknovus’ TK3713 ONU chip. I believe that this is an important development for the EPON as it facilitates the expansion of the traditional Ethernet communications equipment manufacturers into the EPON market, and thus leverages one of the biggest advantages of the EPON -- the ubiquity of Ethernet. This should help penetrate the EPON technology in Fiber-to-the-Business (FTTB) because of easy integration of the local LAN with the EPON.

Any comments on potential customers of Furukawa?

Chelsio Support for Windows Server 2003

Chelsio announced that it would support Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Scalable Networking Pack on its line of 10Gb Ethernet networking solutions. The focus is on improving the efficiency of network protocol processing on Windows Server 2003 which frees up networking-related central processing unit (CPU) overhead resulting in a boost to overall system performance and a reduction of system bottlenecks.

Details are available in the press release here.

Cheaper 10 Gig Ethernet?

There has been a lot of discussion on the net on the recent announcement by Bay Microsystems that it is developing a new network processor that can cut the costs of 10 Gig EThernet to $400 a port and 1 Gig Ethernet to $40 a port. Details on the news are available here.

Zhone Announces Active Ethernet Products

Zhone today announced its EtherActive Product to deliver high bandwidth Ethernet services over fiber in FTTP/FTTH markets. Zhone's EtherActive Optical Line Terminal (OLT) can support up to 10 subscribers per blade with 10/100/1000 Mbps service over either copper or single/dual mode fiber utilizing industry-standard EFM technology.

Active Ethernet has been chosen as an alternative high bandwidth solution to the Passive Optical Network (PON) in many parts of the world such as the city of Amsterdam. The main difference between the two is that while active ethernet is a point-to-point architecture, the PON is a tree-and-branch shared architecture while helps decrease fiber cost and share a channel/wavelength amongst multiple users.

A nice informative discussion between Active and Passive Ethernet is available at:

http://www.xchangemag.com/articles/661feature11.html

IEEE 10Gb/s PHY for EPON Study Group Meeting

The presentation materials for the IEEE 10 Gig PHY for EPON Study Group meeting to be held all day today tomorrow (24th and 25th May 2006) at the Hyatt Regency, Austin, Texas are now available at the IEEE website:

http://www.ieee802.org/3/10GEPON_study/public/may06/index.html

Ethernet Switch Revenue to reach $17 Billion says In-Stat

10 Gigabit Ethernet switches are on a strong growth track and will continue to be in hot demand through 2010, reports In-Stat, a high-tech market research firm. Though this Ethernet switch type will be a highlight, the entire Ethernet switch market will continue to show strong results over the next several years.

QoS Fees more than $2 Billion Market

An interesting discussion on LightReading on the market that carriers could generate by selling QoS to content providers. There has been much debate on the issue of a price for supporting QoS recently, with the chief of AT&T supporting the same and Google opposing it. The news article is available at:

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=95317

Corrigent's CM-100 receives metro ethernet certification

Corrigent Systems announced today that the CM-110 and CM-106 Packet Transport Systems have been certified by the Metro Ethernet Forum.

The CM-100 product line is a packet transport solution capable of delivering carrier-class Ethernet services over a converged packet transport infrastructure. It offers high service availability and guaranteed performance as well as advanced service and fault management capabilities.

Ethernet Alliance creates subcommittees for 10 Gig EPON and 10 Gig over twisted copper

The Ethernet Alliance today announced the formation of subcommittees to support the IEEE 802.3 standardization process for 10G EPON and 10GBASE-T (10 Gig over twisted copper). It also announced the addition of 8 new members.

HeavyReading Report on Carrier Ethernet in Europe

Heavyreading, the marketing research firm of LightReading has released a report highlighting the key initiatives and developments of Carrier Ethernet in Europe. Please refer to more details on the HeavyReading website:

www.heavyreading.com

The summary of the heavyreading report is available at lightreading:

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=95141&WT.svl=wire1_6

Alloptic solution to be deployed by MetroLink

AllOptic has announced that its GEPON solution will be deployed by MetroLink, a CLEC in Sylva, North Carolina to deploy Fiber-To-The-Business (FTTB) services. Details may be found in the following press release:

http://www.alloptic.com/company/prelease_entry.php?id=76

Nortel Introduces Metro Network Initiative

Nortel President and CEO Mike Zafirovski announced a new business initiative in metro Ethernet networks. Such networks will become more of an opportunity as they are re-engineered to handle the coming growth of video applications, Nortel believes. Nortel believes that it can provide innovative Ethernet portfolios designed to deliver high quality, reliability, and security. Detailed news available at:

http://lw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?ARTICLE_ID=255227

IBM System p Products to carry Neterion's 10 Gig E

A press release by Neterion mentions that IBM System p products will feature Neterion's Xframe II Ethernet adapters. IBM already suppoorts Neterion's 10 GigE apaters in its System x server line. Press release available at:

http://www.neterion.com/news/press/pr060516.html

QWest buying OnFiber Communications

Qwest has acquired OnFiber, a provider of business Ethernet and metro Ethernet solutions. The agreement values OnFiber at $107 million. Qwest currently offers similar serices within its 14 state region, and it seems that the motivation behind this deal is to expand beyond its traditional metro markets. Read full press release at:

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060515/20060515005495.html?.v=1

5/16/2006: Followup: News analysis available at Lightreading.
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=94894

Myricom seeing benefits of embracing Ethernet

A nice article on "Byte and Switch" discussing Myricom beginning to see the benefits of integrating Ethernet with its custom Myrinet technology. The article is at:

http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=94761

An overview of Myricom's dual protocol solutions incorporating 10 Gig Myrinet with 10 Gig Ethernet may be found at:

http://www.myri.com/Myri-10G/10gbe_solutions.html

BT keen on Nortel's Provider Backbone Transport

Nice article on LightReading about Nortel's Provider Backbone Transport (PBT). PBT is a management platform that takes out some of the management complexity of Ethernet for the delivery of point-to-point Ethernet services.

Nortel's approach is to simplify Ethernet by turning off features, such as the Spanning Tree protocol and MAC address flooding, and enabling network operators to manage their Ethernet service delivery by using a set of management tools. Nortel's claims that this approach gives the control and scaleability desired from Ethernet networks without relying on MPLS, thus making the solution cost effective.

Read full article at:
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=94724

Finnet using Zhone

Finnet has selected and deployed Zhone’s EtherXtend to deliver Ethernet service to businesses in its serving area. Zhone provides Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) over copper solutions.

IEEE 802.3 meetings

The next task force and study group meetings are at Austin, TX. The agenda of the meeting is available at the following link:

https://www.ieeecommunities.org/epon?type=join

There is no meeting fee for this meeting as it is being organized by Vitesse. Nice oppurtunity for students and other folks nearby Austin to attend the proceedings. I attended one way back in 2003 and it was a great learning experience.

Chelsio Adapters supported by FalconStor's SAN Software

Chelsio and FalconStor will provide IP storage area network (IP SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) customers with Chelsio's T204/T210 adapters interoperable with FalconStar's IPStor software. The press release is available on the Chelsio website.

Poll

Dear Readers,
We have been discussing news and events that having been shaping Ethernet over the past 9 months at this forum. In order to get a feel of what your interests are amongst the various sub-topics, we are organizing a poll, which you would find in the top right corner of the screen. Please vote in it. This poll is open till Saturday, May 13. The results will be posted thereafter on this forum.

Thanks you for your participation.

BT Issues 21CN Ethernet RFP

LightReading reports that the BT Group has issued a major Ethernet equipment Invitation to Tender (ITT) for its £10 billion (US$18.7 billion) 21CN next-generation network project. The article mentions that BT says it is spending about £3.4 billion (US$6.3 billion) on the initial contracts with its eight preferred suppliers, but it is not giving any guidance about the planned capital expenditure to be used on Ethernet gear.

Read the full article at:
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=94256&WT.svl=news1_3

Broadcom Ships two billionth ethernet port

Broadcom has announced that it has shipped more than 2 billion Ethernet ports including 200 million Gigabit-over-copper PHY ports.

Broadcom shipped its first Ethernet port in 1995. In the Linley Group's "Networking Silicon Market Share 2005" report, Broadcom is ranked as the number one supplier of all Ethernet Integrated Circuits (ICs), including Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and Fast Ethernet (FE) components and holds a 45.6% share of the market.

2 Billion. Amazing number. Demonstrates the ubiquity of Ethernet. What started as such a simple technology has surpassed all other technologies, and is now seen everywhere: notebooks, routers, switches, access points, ...

Press release at: http://www.broadcom.com/press/release.php?id=852110&source=home

Aktino Gets Metro Ethernet Forum Certification

Aktino has been awarded the Metro Ethernet Form (MEF) 9 certification from Iometrix, the MEF authorized lab, for its AK4000 product family.

The AK4000 product family enables 10 to 25 Mbps business-class Ethernet services. Introduced in mid-2005, the AK4000 family is a cost-effective, operationally feasible business broadband solution to bridge the service gap between high-bandwidth, high-margin Ethernet over fiber services and low-bandwidth DS1 or Ethernet over DS1 HDSL-based solutions.

Inifinera Joins Ethernet Alliance

Infinera is the first vendor completely focussing on optical systems and switches to join the Ethernet Alliance. Seems that this shall give the Ethernet Alliance added muscle as it pushes to 100 Gig Ethernet. Infinera has developed the first optical system offering capacity in 100 Gb/s increments, leveraging Infinera’s 100 Gb/s photonic integrated circuits (PICs). I

nfinera demonstrated 400 Gb/s PICs in 2005 and recently demonstrated the world's first 1.6 terabit per second (Tb/s) PIC. PIC technology promises to be a key enabler for scaling Ethernet into the Tb/s era. The steady advances of Infinera's PIC technology, combined with the rapid growth of bandwidth in the IP network, suggest that the move from 40 Gb/s to 100 Gb/s will take a fraction of the time of the move from 10 Gb/s to 40 Gb/s. Please read more details on teh company press release which dates back to April 27, 2006.

http://www.infinera.com/news/2006-04-27.html

Report Positions Neterion as Leader in 10 Gig Ethernet

An article that I missed reporting, dates back to April 18. Based on a report by The Linley Group, the leading provider of independent technology analysis for the networking-silicon industry, Neterion's market share is the 10 Gig Ethernet Adapter market was placed at 48.7% with an annual growth rate of 156.8%.

Market for GEPON Growing: Teknovus

Press Release from Teknovus today mentioning that demand for triple-play on GEPON is rapidly growing and over 20 carriers have deployed Teknovus GEPON OLTs and ONUs to support triple play. These carriers are mainly in Taiwan, China, Korea, and Japan. Read artcile for more details.

Force 10 breaks Into Security

Read this interesting article about Force 10 adding intrusion detection to its 10 Gbps switches.

Neterion Introduces Hyperframe

Neterion has developed Hyperframe™, an I/O Virtualization (IOV) architecture that expands hardware support to input/output (I/O) devices, providing end-to-end virtualization for the enterprise data center infrastructure. Platforms that will benefit from this new technology span all elements of the datacenter, from storage to servers, and will be of particular importance to blade server environments. See press release at teh above link.

Artcile on Nyquist Captal on Passave Acquisition

Very interesting read.

Neterion demoing at Storage Networking World

At the upcoming Storage Networking World conference in San Diego, Neterion will announce that they have teamed with Microsoft to offer, for the first time, iSCSI Remote Boot capabilities over a 10 Gigabit Ethernet SAN. This iSCSI SAN diskless boot demo will be featured in the Neterion and Microsoft booths.

Atrica Raises $28M More Funding

Atrica has raised $28 million additional funding. Please read link provided.

PMC-Sierra acquiring Passave

Major chip vendor PMC-Sierra will acquire GEPON (and recently GPON) startup chipmaker Passave. The acquisition cost is report is reported to be $300 Million in stock. Most of Passave’s business is currently with Mitsubishi/NTT in Japan with annual revenues reported to be ~$40 Million.

IEEE Publishes Primer On Ethernet In The First Mile

The importance of this standard (IEEE 802.3ah™-2004) has prompted the IEEE to publish a primer on it. This 480-page volume is a comprehensive look at the EFM standard, which makes Ethernet the foundation for broadband subscriber access networks in the critical link between the Internet and users. Click on title link to check it out.

Lucent paying $207M for Riverstone

The battle for riverstone is finally over with Lucent prevailing over Ericsson with a bid of $207 Million.

10Gig Ethernet PON Study Group

An update on call for interest meet for 10Gig Ethernet PON at Denver last week (March 7).
Slides presented at this meeting are available at http://www.ieee802.org/3/cfi/0306_1/cfi_0306_1.pdf

An interesting aspect is that feasibility studies for 10 Gig EPON have already been conducted by ETRI and KDDI. Work on the standard is expected to be on only the PHY layer (with MPCP fron the 802.3ah standard remaining unaffected). Thus the expected turnaround time for a standard is much less than the 4 years it took for the 802.3ah standard.

The attendance of the meeting was 163 people representing 31 companies of which 58 volunteered to particicpate and contribute to the study group.

Lucent Announces Further Breakthrough in 100 Gigabit per Second Ethernet-Over-Optical

In a paper presented to the Optical Fiber Communication Conference & Exposition (OFC) in Anaheim last week, Bell Labs announced the first reported optical transport of electronically multiplexed 107 Gigabit per second (Gbps) data. This result represents another significant milestone in the industry's march towards being able to offer transport speeds of 100 Gbps Ethernet data networking in metro area networks.

10-Gbit Ethernet over copper specification advances

The draft standard for 10-Gbit Ethernet over copper moved closer to approval after a meeting of the 802.3an task force. Additional editorial suggestions will be considered at a spring meeting, but editors at the IEEE 802 plenary session on last Thursday (March 9) said that all significant technical issues appear to have been resolved.

Extereme unveils BlackDiamond 12K

Extreme has built the BlackDiamond 12K, a new carrier Ethernet switch designed to deliver data and triple-play services to both business and residential subscribers, support for thousands of users per platform, and provide known QoS.

Ethernet Alliance adds 16 new members

Some of the prominent new members are Cisco Systems, Teknovus, and Neterion

Nyquist Capital article on Teknovus and Passave

This is an interesting article comparing Teknovus and Passave, two vendors for EPON chipsets. Particularly interesting is the prospect of acquisition for either of these companies by possible bigger players such as Broadcom.

Carrier Ethernet surges in 2005

Interesting article on LightReading on carrier Ethernet

Cisco Adds to Carrier Ethernet Products

Today Cisco introduced the Cisco ME 6500 Series Ethernet Switch and the Cisco ONS 15310 Metro Access (MA) multiservice provisioning platform (MSPP) which delivers Carrier Ethernet services over synchronous optical network, or SONET infrastructures. The Cisco ME 6500 Series Ethernet switches are available in two models and are available starting at a list price of $24,000. The Cisco ONS 15310-MA platform is also available now and a basic configuration model starts at a list price of $18,000.

Editshare chooses Chelsio 10Gb Ethernet adapters

EditShare LLC, the pioneer of cross platform shared media storage solutions for collaborative video editing, has chosen Chelsio's 10Gb Ethernet adapters as a high-speed interface solution for its video editing system. The EditShare collaborative editing and shared media storage system allows all connected content creation workstations to create and access a common pool of media files, while guaranteeing that individual workstations never interfere with, damage, or erase media on other workstations on the network. Read the press release at:

http://www.chelsio.com/newsevents/pr/pr_021306.php

Moving to 100 Gig Ethernet

There has been a lot of discussion in various forums since Force10 announced its desire to move to the 100 Gig Ethernet world. Some interesting articles are:

The Road to 100 Gig Ethernet
Deciding the Future of Ethernet

Lucent buy Riverstone for $170 million

Lucent today decided to buy a Carrier Ethernet company, Riverstone, for $170 million. Lucent has alreay been reselling Riverstone boxes for some time now. Riverstone's stock price shot up by 81% to give it a market capitalization of $125 million.

ClariPhy targets 10 Gig Ethernet

ClariPhy Communications, an Irvine-based startup, is developing mixed-signal ICs that set new performance benchmarks for multi-gigabit per second (Gbit/s) communications applications. The company's initial products target the emerging 10GBASE-LRM (LRM) Ethernet standard.

Verizon Budiness Extends Ethernet services

Verizon Business announced today that it has expanded the availability of its Ethernet access services in key cities in the United States, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. The expansion will enable large business and government customers to seamlessly link their offices -- via an advanced, cost-effective high-speed data and voice network -- not only locally and regionally, but nationally and globally as well. In addition, Verizon Business' Ethernet services will enable customers to more easily use Internet protocol (IP) applications, such as streaming media and distance-learning, at all of their company locations.

Neterion Launches Reseller Program

Neterion, which makes 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters, is rolling out a partner program designed to expand its reach among users. It also said that an adapter that connects to servers via PCI-Express, dubbed Xframe E, currently is being tested by OEMs, and that another product, called the Xframe II/h, is designed for servers with smaller chassis, such as Sun Microsystems Sun Fire systems running on Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processor.

Agilent's WireScope for fiber testing in 10G Ethernet

Agilent has introduced a handheld cable and fiber tester that the company says offers among the industry's fastest certification for Category 3 to Category 6a/7 cabling. The company says its WireScope Pro tester delivers superior near- and far-end crosstalk measurement performance, while enabling Alien Crosstalk (AXT) measurements, which the company says are critical for testing LAN cabling's suitability for running 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE).

Teknovus releases new Ethernet PON ONU chipset

Teknovus today announced the TK3713 ONU chipset. TK3713 provides all the features needed for a single-chip, IPTV-capable ONU. Read the press release at:

http://www.teknovus.com/teknews_01_17b_2006.html

Teknovus and KDDI announce plans for Next Generation EPON

Teknovus (vendor of EPON chipsets) and KDDI (a leading telecom service provider in Japan) today announced a Next Generation Ethernet Passive Optical Network (NGEPON) roadmap with speeds of up to 10 Gb/s. This development program is driven by the new, bandwidth-intensive IPTV services that carriers will be introducing in the near future. NGEPON systems will support hundreds of interactive channels, a rich mix of high-definition content, and virtual personal video recording capabilities. Read news at:

http://www.teknovus.com/teknews_01_17_2006.html

Foundary launches 2 new ethernet switches

Foundry Networks launched the next generation of its ServerIron 10 Gigabit Ethernet Layer 4 through Layer 7 switches, today. The new ServerIron GT 10G switches leverage Foundry's fourth-generation application processors to help scale application network performance beyond what its existing 10 Gigabit Ethernet ServerIron switches can provide. Read news at:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1910672,00.asp

Western Scientific using Chelsio 10GigE chipsets

Western Scientific will be using Chelsio's T210 10 GigE interface cards with support for TCP offload in its Fusion server and FusionSA Storage Server products. Western Scientific provides reliable computing clusters, data storage, workstations and networking solutions to Fortune 50 corporations, scientific research facilities, government and educational institutions, to name a few.

Ethernet Alliance

The broadband industry gave birth to yet another trade group last night – the Ethernet Alliance, a combine of industry players created with the avowed goal of supporting Ethernet standards. Founding members include 3Com, Agere Systems, Broadcom, Force10 Networks, Foundry Networks, Intel, Pioneer Corporation, Quake Technologies, Samsung, Sun Microsystems, Tyco Electronics, and Xilinx. Read news at:

http://www.telecomweb.com/news/1136920474.htm

EPON vs GPON comparison

Wishes for a prosperous new year for all our readers. An article providing an excellent analysis of EPON vs GPON may be found at:

http://fibers.org/articles/news/7/12/5/1