Ciena Unveils Ethernet Services Provisioning Switch

Ciena introduced a carrier-grade, ten-slot Ethernet chassis specifically designed for telco and cable service providers to deliver triple play services to residential and commercial customers over a converged packet network, including high-value Ethernet private line and LAN services.



Ciena's CN 4350 combines full mesh 160 Gbps fabric, "VirtualWire" VLAN switching, GbE and WDM transport interfaces. The CN 4350 delivers absolute QoS by assigning each service its own "virtual wire" with guaranteed end-to-end bandwidth and performance. VirtualWire VLANs enable port trunking, cross-connecting, and switching with TDM-like GbE transport performance. Among its eight Class of Service queues are two Strict Priority queues for VoIP and video traffic. Ciena said the CN 4350 also supports 100% line utilization without packet loss.



The ten-slot chassis fully redundant power, fans, switch fabric and controller modules, has separate data and control planes, and is NEBS Level 3 certified. Ciena is providing a ten port by 1 Gbps Ethernet switching interface module that features Small Form-factor Pluggable (SFP) optics, carrier-grade SONET-like performance monitoring, an embedded signaling and control channel, sophisticated packet processing, jumbo packet support, 64MB of packet buffer memory, and RMON support. With eight of these modules plugged in, the fully loaded system delivers 80 full duplex Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports.



ARMSTRONG Cable, a large U.S. cable operator with subscribers across five states, has already deployed the platform.
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