Backbone-News

Cogent Communications reported on their blog that they are continuing to grow their network coverage in Europe. New countries added to their network footprint include:

Ireland: Dublin

Italy: Arezzo, Bologna, Florence, Rome, and Venice/Padua

Finland: Helsinki
Norway: Oslo
Sweden: Malmo

Czech Republic: Prague
Hungary: Budapest
Romania: Bucharest
Slovakia: Bratislava

Especially the cities in Eastern Europe show the recent trend of most of the major international Service Providers moving further into the eastern European countries, which have become a popular outsourcing region for many multinational corporations and which see a massive growth over the last years.

Click here to see their updated network map.

Shortly after having announced that nLayer chose the MX960 platform to extend/upgrade their network, Juniper adds another high profile Service Provider which has chosen the MX960 router. Carphone Warehouse (CPW) is providing connectivity to more then 1.5 million households in the UK, the largest part through AOL UK which CPW acquired last year.

CPW is using the MX960 as part of their NGN (Next Generation Network) in the UK which extends to 70% of UK households already.

Read more in the press-release.

Cisco launched their new Edge Router platform today at Cebit in Hannover. The ASR 1000 series of routers are targeted for the Enterprise and Service provider markets, and are placed in between the 7200 and 7600 series of routers.

The heart of the ASR 1000 is the QuantumFlow Processor. A highly dense custom ASIC providing up to 100Gpbs (up to 20Gbps in the ASR series routers) of packet processing bandwidth. This allows the entire payload and headers of frames to be processed by the chip, accelerating Deep Packet Inspection and application-specific processing.

The Cisco ASR 1000 series is available in different packaging options, differentiated by the number of I/O slots, capacity, redundancy, and power:

• Cisco ASR 1002 (2-rack-unit [2RU] chassis with the modular Cisco ASR 1000 Series Embedded Services Processor [ESP] and fixed Cisco ASR 1000 Series RP1 and Cisco ASR 1000 Series SPA Interface Processor [SIP] with 4 built-in Gigabit Ethernet ports)

• Cisco ASR 1004 (4RU chassis with modular ESP, route processor, and SIPs)

• Cisco ASR 1006 (6RU chassis with modular and redundant ESPs, route processor, and SIPs for SPA connectivity)

As the above list shows, only the ASR 1006 allows the use of redundant forwarding planes (ESPs) and route processors.

Two different ESPs will be available: ESP-5G and ESP-10G. The performance of the ESP is the core factor for all high-touch services provided on the ASR platform, including:

• IPsec
• QoS
• NBAR (Network Based Application Recognition)
• GRE
• Firewall
• Full and Sampled NetFlow

QoS is supported at multigigabit rates without any significant degradation to other data plane-bounded functions, and no degradation to control plane-related features.

The linecards used in the ASR 1000 are the already familiar SPAs. Following is the complete list of SPAs that are supported at platform first customer shipment (FCS):

• 8-port Gigabit Ethernet
• 1-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet
• 2-, 5-, and 10-port Gigabit Ethernet
• 8-port Fast Ethernet
• 8-port T1/E1
• 2- and 4-port T3/E3
• 2- and 4-port OC-3/STM-1 Packet over SONET/SDH (PoS)
• 1-port OC-12/STM-4 PoS
• 2- and 4 -port Channelized T3
• 4-port serial (12-in-1)

Customers include BT, who is going to use it as part of their 21st Century network and also NTT who use it as part of their IPTV network roll-out.