Ciena builds its IP edge

Part II: IP Routing: Ciena's Vyatta acquisition 

Ciena’s acquisition of AT&T’s Vyatta team is a further step in its campaign to bolster its internet protocol (IP) expertise.

Ciena will gain 60 IP engineers with expertise in network operating systems (NOS).

“If you believe that IP-optical convergence is a trend, and Ciena does, then you need expertise in both areas,” says Joe Marsella, vice president, product line management, routing and switching at Ciena.

Joe Marsella

Ciena has been growing its IP expertise for the last five years. “We are competing against companies that have been doing this for 30 years,” says Marsella. “The more experience we can bring in, the more it helps us.”

Ciena says the deal emerged gradually. ”I can’t say it was a Ciena or an AT&T idea; it was a mutual discussion over time that finally resulted in an acquisition,” says Marsella.

Ciena will also gain its first R&D centre in Europe. The deal is expected to be completed before the year-end.

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ECI Telecom details its cell-site gateway for 5G

ECI Telecom has unveiled its cell-site router for 5G that also supports existing 3G and 4G wireless standards. 

“You need to support the existing one or two generations of cellular networks,” says Jimmy Mizrahi, ECI’s executive vice president and head of global portfolio.

Jimmy MizrahiThe platform, the NPT 1022 cell-site router, is the first of several platforms that ECI will launch for 5G as it upgrades and expands its Neptune product line.

“The 1022 is part of a new line of products covering all layers of the network, starting at the cell site and going to aggregation and the metro core,” says Ezra Yehezkel, product line manager, packet transport solutions at ECI.

The Neptune portfolio will include a high-capacity packet-processing platform that can scale to 16 terabits. 

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TIP launches a disaggregated cell-site gateway design

Part 1: TIP white-box designs

Four leading telecom operators, members of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), have developed a disaggregated white-box design for cell sites. The four operators are Orange, Telefonica, TIM Brazil and Vodafone. BT is also believed to be backing the open-design cell-site venture.

 Source: ADVA

The first TIP cell-site gateway product, known as Odyssey-DCSG, is being brought to market by ADVA and Edgecore Networks.

TIP isn’t the only open design framework that is developing cell-site gateways. Edgecore Networks contributed in October a design to the Open Compute Project (OCP) that is based on an AT&T cell-site gateway specification. There are thus two overlapping open networking initiatives developing disaggregated cell-site gateways. 

ADVA and Edgecore will provide the standardised cell-site gateways as operators deploy 5G. The platforms will support either commercial cell-site gateway software or open-source code. 

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