Will telcos benefit from Alca-Lu 400G?

 

“There is no question that Alcatel-Lucent has made a significant advance in router semi-conducting performance, but it’s a lost opportunity to talk about service-layer functionality when they were very specific about higher speeds in the future,” said CIMI Corp. President Tom Nolle.

 

“There are only two reasons to have bigger processors on cards—one is to push more bits and the other is to do more with the bits you’re pushing. No vendor has clearer positioning in the service layer than Alcatel-Lucent, but they blew kisses at the notion of service functionality and didn’t close the deal,” Nolle added.

 

Initially, the high-performance processors will go into edge router line cards because network bottlenecks are most prevalent due to multimedia traffic growth, according to Heidi Adams, senior director of IP product marketing at Alcatel-Lucent. Alcatel-Lucent doesn’t have a core router product, but industry analysts are watching to see if the FP3 indicates a push into core routing.

 

According to recent Dell’Oro Group research, Cisco’s share of the edge router market dropped to 42% in 2010 from 57% in 2006, while Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper basically tied for second place with 22 % and 20 %of the edge market, respectively.

 

While Alcatel-Lucent has established credibility in the edge network, “it would have been logical to say, ‘here’s the chassis for the core,’” said ACG Managing Partner Ray Mota. “If it’s all about speeds and feeds, they kind of pushed the competition to accelerate their R&D. But they left some things open to the imagination in terms of the roadmap, and carriers like to have an idea of how the whole solution fits together.”

 

Shin Umeda, vice president of router market research at Dell’Oro, believes Alcatel-Lucent is initially positioning the chipset as an extension of its edge routing technology, but it may try to repurpose the edge router chipset to function in the core, as well.

 

“If it works, it would save some R&D money and help Alcatel-Lucent enter the core router market, where the barrier to entry is extremely high and takes several hundred million dollars in development over several years to even build the silicon for the router, let alone develop the software,” Umeda said.

 

Since 400G eclipses current core router performance, Alcatel-Lucent’s Adams said the FP3 is the fundamental technology that will enable the company to take the next step in 400G routing once the technology is standardized, a path slated for the 2014-2015 time frame.