Alcatel Brings 1850 TSS to North America

Alcatel is introducing its 1850 Transport Service Switch to the North American market this week at GLOBALCOMM.

Introduced in ETSI markets last fall, the 1850 TSS offers carriers the ability to mix Ethernet, TDM and WDM in a single platform to ease the transition from circuit-based to packet-based transport infrastructures.

“The concept is simple, but it required technical elegance and the right market,” said Bruce Miller, head of product marketing for Alcatel's North American optical networks. “In the past, the focus was on TDM and adding data rather than solving this problem.”

The 1850 TSS, he said, partitions the switch fabric, thereby “flattening” the transport network.

In contrast to an MSPP, the 1850 TSS delivers TDM, WDM and packet natively and does not map TDM into Ethernet or data over SONET, said David Waterhouse, vice president of product marketing for Alcatel’s Optical Networks Division. “The MSPP-based network element is designed to carry SONET and is adapted for data. It’s great for its ‘multiservice-ness,’ but you can only get a certain percentage of data traffic. That’s inefficient.”

Uniquely, the 1850 TSS relies on a “Universal Switch” technology that can aggregate, switch and transport any combination of Ethernet/MPLS/RPR, SONET/SDH and WDM services natively. This means carriers can use the universal slot for either TDM or packet as opposed to having line cards side by side dedicated to each. The result is that any ratio of packet to TDM can be provided with the capacity of the system. The 1850 TSS is initially available in North America in the 100gbps chassis size.

“Why it’s important is carriers have TDM and want to migrate to packet but they don’t know the pace of the transition,” he said, explaining that with the 1850 TSS, service providers can transform over time. Miller said while they might be 100 percent TDM today, they want to avoid stranded assets as they move to packet. In service provider networks, the 1850 TSS can provide capex savings of more than 30 percent and opex savings of more than 40 percent, compared to alternative architectures based on separate platforms.

Waterhouse said the 1850 TSS also has advantages over the other common approach to aggregation networks – pure Ethernet, which is “good for scaling of packet-based services but weak in support of TDM … and it doesn’t have WDM, so there is a total capacity issue as well.”

Alcatel said it is engaged in trials and commercial deployments with nearly 20 undisclosed service providers in both ETSI markets and North America, where it has been selling the product prior to this week’s launch.

Alcatel www.alcatel.com

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