Turin Delivers Optical Pizza Box with Ethernet Switching

Turin Networks this week takes the wraps off its TraverseEdge 100 (TE-100), an optical platform that includes full-fledged Ethernet switching capability.

Kevin Wade, Turin’s director of product marketing, says the switching feature enables the TE-100 “pizza box” add/drop multiplexer to aggregate and manage traffic at Layer 2 and support next-generation Ethernet services such multipoint VPNs. Wade says Ethernet switching also lets service providers do rate shaping, which enables them offer end users a wider variety of bandwidth increments and better control over the Ethernet service within a metropolitan network – so the provider can have multiple customer sites on one metro network, for example.

Wade says Turin has been a bit delayed in shipping its pizza box ADM, while others have been shipping for six months. But some pizza boxes, he says, don’t offer the reliability carriers expect in the SONET world, so Turin added the ability to support modular capability on the uplink side so if the box’s electronics fail, there is a hardware backup. All pizza boxes offer automated protection switching to recover from cable cuts, he says; Turin’s boxes include that and offer the ability for hardware/software recovering in the event of an equipment failure.

The products support key standards, including generic framing procedure, link capacity adjustment scheme, and both low-order and high-order virtual concatenation.

The SONET version of the TE-100 will be available this quarter, with the SDH version expected out in the fourth quarter. They will start at $7,000.

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