Alcatel Enhances 7750 Service Router

Alcatel tomorrow will announce a variety of enhancements to its 7750 Service Router, the company’s multiservice edge router.

The enhancements include support for hierarchical QoS, which allows the reservation of specific bandwidth for applications or customer sites, opening that bandwidth for other uses when it’s idle.

Also new to the 7750 is a security feature to lessen denial of service threats. It slows the flow of messages from any one source if those messages reach a preset threshold.

And Alcatel new operational tools for the 7750 help providers do service verification and troubleshooting for IP VPNs.

Multiservice edge routers are a hot new product area. According to Mark Bieberich, an analyst with The Yankee Group, these products are deployed primarily for IP/MPLS networks, include an IP/MPLS control plane, today offer 2 to 160gbps of capacity, and support both Layer 2 and 3 services. Products that fall under this category, according to Yankee, include the Alcatel 7750, the Cisco 7600, the Juniper M320, the Laurel ST200 and Tellabs Inc.’s 8800 products.

But, according to The Yankee Group, there are three other categories of products that address the multiservice edge.

That includes IP edge routers, which primarily use a Layer 3 control plan and offer 2 to 80gpbs of full-duplex capacity. Yankee says Cisco Systems Inc.’s 7500 and Juniper Networks Inc.’s M40e fall under this category.

Another multiservice edge product type is broadband remote access servers, or BRAS devices. Yankee groups the Juniper E-series, Redback Networks Inc.’s SMS and Nortel Networks’ Shasta boxes under this heading.

A fourth category offering multiservice edge capabilities is multiservice WAN switches, which primarily use a Layer 2 control platform. Examples here include Nortel’s Passport switch, the Alcatel 7670 and Lucent Technologies Inc.’s CBX 500, according to Yankee.

With the exception of multiservice edge routers, these products all started life with other key functions, but have been upgraded with MPLS capabilities, Yankee says.

Despite a strong group of players, Bieberich says there is likely more to come in this multiservice edge router category. “The multiservice edge router category is wide open,” he says. “The Cisco 7600 has a significant lead, but there are lots of opportunities for new system deployments.

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