Teknovus vs PMC-Sierra

Lightreading has an interesting article about the competition between Teknovus and PMC-Sierra to capture segments of the Asian broadband access market. It mentions Teknovus' CEO Rex Naden mentioning that Teknovus still is hopeful of getting a big contract in Korea as KT moves towards increased deployments and possibly migrate to higher bit-rates (Teknovus supports non standardized EPON solution at 2.5 Gbps).

Competition seems intense between these two leading EPON vendors, because volume deployments of EPON have still not caught up except for in 2 countries, Korea and Japan, which have a combined population of 175 million. On the other hand , EPON is now a very mature industry, and price per port is spiraling down. Since the customers are vendors who sell to a consumer market which is not willing to afford more than $100 per box (and mostly this cost is absorbed by service provider), the margin per port is very low. It is a difficult business unless deployment picks up to tens of million ports per year.

In this light, I believe that its best for PMC-Sierra and Teknovus to join hands and target GPON competition. May be its too late, since North America is heavily inclined towards GPON at this point of time. But there are the big consumer markets - India and China. And Europe is an emerging market too, though many cities such as Paris and Amsterdam have preferred active ethernet.

But often, when two leading competitors collaborate, they increase the market size, which is mutually beneficial. Take the case of Google and AskJeeves in early 2000-2001. Collaboration helped them expand search, and see the size of the search market now.

So my suggestion to both companies is: collaborate against competing technologies. Broadband access market is huge. With positive developments both companies may have billion dollar revenues by the turn of the decade.

Force10 patenting high speed backplanes

Just read a news article about Force 10's focus on patenting high-speed backplane technology. For example, US Patent 7124502 titled "Method of patenting a high-layer-count backplane" has been recently patented by Force 10. I have to read teh patent to find out the speed this can support. Force 10 already has its Terascale E-Series routers which can support a backplane bandwidth of 5 Tbps, and is currently used for 10 Gig Ethernet switches.

Chelsio scores big win

Chelsio's 10 Gig Ethernet adapters will be distributed to Bell Micro. Bell Micro is an important distributor of storage products. This relationship should help increase Chelsio's penetration in the storage market.

The future of networking is in access

I read this article about a Cisco Engineer commuting 186 miles one way from Mariposa to San Jose to work, 5 days a week. This guy won the prize for America's longest work commute and earned a prize money of $10,000 besides other things. I am amazed that there is a competition of this kind. And more amazed that the winner is an employee of a company whose mission states that the "Internet will change the way we work, live, play, and learn".

The key to achieve this is high-speed broadband access, and I would like Cisco and competing companies to invest more money in this. Yes, the Internet is great, it has revolutionized and shrunk the world, communications have become so cheap, but the ultimate test is delivering unprecedented and cheap bandwidth to all users. So that we may communicate in better and more media-rich ways, and distances can be further bridged, and this Cisco Engineer can work from his ranch in Mariposa. Think of how much energy we all could save if we could reduce the work commute, and allow everyone to work from the comfortable environs of home.

So my hope for 2007 is that high-speed broadband access technologies like EPON can start off in the United States. Korea and Japan have leapfrogged ahead in this technology, countries in Europe have also taken the same up.

Korea Telecom hooking up 800000 EPON connections

Happy new year to all readers.

The big news reported on Lightreading today is about Korea Telecom (KT) going ahead with the deployment of 800,000 EPON connections. This is the first large-scale deployment of EPON in Korea. Although KT has been investigating PON including WDM-PON for quite some time now, the target of close to a million subscribers in 2007 is big news.

The main equipment builder is expected to be Dasan which will be using PMC-Sierra (Passave) chipsets.

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.