Overture Unveils 10 Gig Carrier Ethernet Edge Platform

Carrier Ethernet equipment supplier Overture Networks now is offering a 10 Gigabit Carrier Ethernet edge platform to enable the transition to an all-optical Ethernet network. The ISG 4800 expands the company’s Carrier Ethernet offering that now ranges from 1 Mbps to 10 Gbps.

Overture’s ISG 4800 10 Gigabit Carrier Ethernet edge platform offers service providers a way to make increased bandwidth available for enterprise access, mobile backhaul and key vertical applications. (For more on what’s driving Carrier Ethernet).

As telco service providers make the shift away from SONET and SDH networks, it’s important that their Carrier Ethernet equipment be compact; temperature-hardened; and designed for the demanding environments of the telco central office, outside plant cabinet, datacenter or enterprise wiring closet, according to Mark Durrett, marketing director at Overture Networks.

Cable operators interested in the enterprise business market may want to go straight to 10 Gig Ethernet services, said Durrett: "The panacea is this enterprise customer. Cox has the fourth-largest carrier Ethernet network in the United States. Everybody else wants to get into this space. If cable operators jump to 10 Gig, they can leapfrog competitors."

Other features of Overture’s ISG 4800 include monitoring capability required for high-performance financial services and data-center applications.

10 Gigabit Ethernet is emerging in a number of different applications at the network edge, and having a single platform that can support many scenarios may reduce operational expenses for the service provider. The ISG 4800 is built on a modular architecture supporting combinations of as many as six 10 GigE interfaces and as many as 16 1 GigE interfaces, with a wide selection of pluggable optics.

-Linda Hardesty