Teknovus gets $28 million funding

Teknovus, one of the leading companies making EPON chipsets, yesterday announced $28 million funding from a group of equity firms. New investors in Teknovus include Lightspeed Venture Partners and the Galleon Crossover Fund, Vision Venture Capital from Taiwan and Technology Alliance Investment and Itochu Technology Ventures from Japan. Teknovus’ existing investors also participated in this round, including USVP, Partech, Focus, Samsung, and Mitsubishi.

Our blog turns two years

We turn two years today. For those interested, our first post is here.


It has been a great experience following trends in this very hot and growing field. Just looking back at the progress, Ethernet PON is now widely deployed with 10 Gig standardization coming up, 40/100 Gig standardization is going on, 10 Gig Ethernet adapters are close to entering the volume market, and high speed I/O is now being considered more and more important by chip and server vendors.

Thanks to all readers, all those to supported the blog sending comments and emails. Hope you continue to find this blog useful in the future.

Also we will soon come up with a new layout and a poll. Please help us understand your needs better by participating in the poll. Thanks again.

EPON to be deployed around Paris, big win for the open access model

Sipperec , which provides power and telecom services on behalf of 86 municipalities around Paris today announced a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network called Sequantic, which will build on its fiber backbone. This will provide connectivity to buildings targetting about 6,500 enterprises in 147 business areas located in the municipalities. Sipperec will then sell capacity on the network to service providers, so adopting the "open access" model. This is a major boost to this model promoting neutrality to the network provider also adopted by UTOPIA in Utah and the City of Amsterdam.

At UC Davis Networks Research group, we proposed advanced network protocols that may be useful to promote the "open access" model. This protocol aims to guarantee established Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to both users and service providers simultaneously. Our work was published in the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communication, a copy available here.

Matisse Networks announces $45 million Series C VC funding

Matisse Networks which is building Ethernet over Optical Burst Switch technology today announced that it had closed $45 million Series C funding from Merrill Lynch PCG and other VCs. Matisse's EtherBurst switch is one of the few companies in the Optical Burst Switching (OBS) Domain.

OBS attempts to bridge the gap between optical circuit switching technology (which is widely deployed now) and packet switching which is non-existent in the optical domain because optical components cannot match electronic speeds. OBS establishes dedicated circuits for short durations of time by sending a signal in advance in the control domain which reconfigures the network to form the circuit. Data (which is called an optical burst) is then transmitted over this circuit. The network can be then reconfigured to form a different circuit along which a different optical burst may be sent. While OBS is a neat concept and has existed in academic research since the late nineties, it has not been commercially exploited other than some prototype demonstrations.

I am curious as to how the EtherBurst switches Ethernet 1500 MTU size packets over an OBS network since the granularity of a burst will be much much (1000x) larger than an Ethernet packet. May be they aggregate packets to a destination together and then transfer them. But then latency suffers. It would be great if Matisse came up with some performance characteristics such as throughput delivered, latency, etc.

Cisco launches 802.11n Wireless Access Point

Yesterday Cisco launched its first 802.11n-based Ethernet access point (AP), the Aironet 1250. This is based on the 802.11n draft 2 which is currently being standardized and will offer 300 Mbps of wireless access connectivity. Moreover, the access point can be powered by wired Ethernet which avoids having power installations at the deployment point. This product is priced at $1299.

I also read a recent research group report which projected that by 2010 most of wired ethernet in LANs will be replaced by 802.11n technology. I am not so sure. While wireless has the advantage of ubiquity, it still lacks consistant steady performance and security. For example, I see a marked difference between viewing video over my home 802.11g network and with a direct ethernet connection. And the issue is not of bandwidth, 54 Mbps is far more than what my DSL provides.

I am also sure that wired ethernet will be dominant in corporate LANs. Dont think a business can imagine it crucial data floating in the air :)

I have also been having some connectivity issues in my home wireless network, and would be glad if any of you could leave a comment on how to solve it. I live in a densely populated area. There are at least 20 wireless networks around my area. When I switch on my laptop it often has problems connecting to my wireless network. It takes quite a bit of time, sometimes 15-20 minutes before I get connectivity. I suspect it is because of running out of wireless channels in the 801.11g frquency domain. Any thoughts?