Cisco Systems announced significant enhancements to its Cisco 7600 Series Router portfolio, including a multicast connection admission control (CAC) capability to more efficiently deliver video services and an integrated video/IPTV quality-monitoring module to improve the delivery of high-quality video services.
The new Cisco multicast and previously announced video-on-demand (VoD) CAC solutions distinguish among paid VoD, free VoD, specific high-demand broadcast channels and many other video deliverables.
Cisco said service providers can avoid the need to permanently provision their networks with the bandwidth required to handle occasional peaks by deploying a CAC solution to handle those peaks.
In addition, new standards-based Ethernet operations, administration and maintenance (OA&M) capabilities enable improved service assurance for all Ethernet-based services, and a new integrated mesh Wireless Service Module (WiSM) for metropolitan Wi-Fi mesh network aggregation enables providers to more efficiently expand their service portfolios utilizing existing 7600 Series Router deployments.
New capabilities include:
- Video Quality-Monitoring Module - The Cisco Network Analysis Module monitors video streams in real time and sends proactive alerts to providers if picture quality is degraded, enabling them to determine the cause of the degradation and correct it before call centers are overwhelmed.
- Fault Detection - 7600 Series Routers now support IEEE 802.1ag and IEEE 802.3ah standards. IEEE 802.1ag enables providers to manage customer-service instances individually, alerting them when an Ethernet virtual connection (EVC) or virtual local-area network (VLAN) fails and providing the tools to rapidly isolate the failure. IEEE 802.3ah enables link monitoring for critical events and puts the remote device into "loopback" mode in order to test it when events occur. It also discovers unidirectional links, which occur when transmission fails in only one direction.
- IP/MPLS Resiliency - IP/Multiprotocol Label Switching provides added support for nonstop forwarding with stateful switchover (NSF/SSO) and ensures availability even if the control plane fails. The 7600 Series Routers also offer MPLS link protection and pseudowire redundancy for Layer 2 failover.
- The Cisco 7600 Series Wireless Services Module (WiSM) provides integrated Wi-Fi access-point aggregation, enabling providers to scale and manage metropolitan Wi-Fi mesh networks. The WiSM supports Lightweight Access Point Protocol (LWAPP) and also provides extensive integrated security capabilities like Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA2), and various types of Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), including Protected EAP (PEAP). The module also improves wireless security through rogue access-point detection and containment and support of a wireless intrusion-prevention system to provide consistent security-policy enforcement across the entire fixed/wireless network.
