Alcatel Takes Next Major Step with 7300 DSLAM Line

The leader in the DSLAM space, Alcatel has taken the wraps off the 7301 ASAM, which the company says is its most significant DSLAM announcement in three years.

The 7301 ASAM, which can be purchased new or as a hardware/software upgrade to Alcatel’s popular 7300 ASAM, was designed with network optimization and new services in mind, says Jay Fausch, Alcatel’s senior director of marketing.

Because the profileration of DSL has brought up more nodes into DSL networks, Alcatel has built subtending into the 7301. Subtending allows one DSL node, such as a DSL remote terminal or a DSL-enabled next-generation DLC, to feed traffic to another DSLAM upstream. Subtending and aggregation using the 7301 can be done at DS1, nxDSL1, DS3, OC3 and gigabit Ethernet connections.

Fausch says the 7301 also takes advantage of latent bus capacity that has always been in the company’s DSLAMs. With the 7301, however, Alcatel has activated the box’s broadcast video bus, so the DSLAM has a dedicated 622mbps bus for broadcast video and a separate 622mbps bus for data. The net effect is the DSLAM’s backplane can support 170gbps of traffic. With that capacity, the 7301 can support up to 200 channels of video compressed at 2.5 megabits or a combination of 2.5-megabit video and high-definition TV channels. “We like to think of it as very high capacity and future proof,” says Fausch.

Also new with the 7301 is a network processor with 5gbps of capacity. The 7300 had a 155mbps “IQ bus” rather than an on-board network processor, says Fausch. The benefit of the network processor is that it lets service providers run more traffic through the box and is non blocking. The upgrade adds nearly 1.3gbps of capacity in every slot. Those carriers upgrading to the 7301 from the 7300 will need to update one card per shelf and get the new software, to get this new functionality.

The network processor also enables the 7301 to support broadcast and multicast video in a much more effective way than the 7300 model, which required a special card to support multicast video, says Fausch. Putting that capability in the network processor simplifies the architecture and consumes less in the way of resources within the DSLAM itself, Fausch explains.

The 7301 also brings the ability to shape traffic at the virtual path level, rather traffic shaping per line as its predecessor does. Also, with its increased capacity, the 7301 can physically handle 10,000 users, some that are directly served by the 7301 and some through subtending.

Fausch adds that the 7301 can be used by carriers to serve high-end customers direct off the box, “so you could do a high-capacity leased line-type service with this.”

All told, Fausch says the new features of the 7301 can mean $400,000 to $500,000 a month in additional subscriber revenue just from business applications.

The 7301 is available as an upgrade to the 7300 at no more than 25 percent of the cost of the original equipment, says Fausch, adding that’s a “worst case” scenario. The approximate cost of the 7301 as a new device is “maybe 10 percent more than the 7300 cost originally,” says Fausch, who declined to specify the original pricing of the 7300. The product is available in limited numbers now, with general availability planned by the end of the year. Fausch adds that the upgrade is “very low impact,” requiring an upgrade of a single card per shelf and that the upgrade is designed to fit into a regular maintenance window.

Although now contacts have yet been announced for the 7301, existing users of the 7300 include BellSouth, Bell Canada, SBC Communications Inc. and Verizon. These customers of Alcatel’s in North America alone had close to 6.5 million DSL subscribers by the end of the first quarter this year. Given that there were about 800,000 DSL subscribers in North America in the first quarter of 2000, “the vast majority of the 6 million additions of those four carriers was done on Alcatel gear.”

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