Tellabs is launching its 6340 Switch Node (Booth 77) as part of a new optical Ethernet system that enables Ethernet over SDH. This allows service providers to optimise their existing voice-only, SDH networks to deliver broadband Ethernet services without the capital cost of a parallel router-based network.
Most enterprises already use Ethernet-based LANs for internal communication, simplifying the interface to the external network.
The 6340 switches and maps Ethernet traffic into concatenated virtual containers of the SDH network for efficient transport together with circuit-oriented traffic from, for example, PABXs or leased lines. Virtual concatenation acts as a configurable bandwidth-conditioner.
Instead of allocating the full transport capacity to serve every Ethernet client, virtual concatenation assigns only a fraction of the bandwidth relative to the peak rate of the Ethernet interface itself. Scaling becomes just a matter of configuration.