In a bid to meet the needs of telecommunications and cable television network operators wanting to deliver multimedia services, Northern Telecom Ltd has announced a 40Gbps backbone Asynchronous Transfer Mode network switch that it says is scalable up to 80Gbps and down to 10Gbps. The Mississauga, Ontario-based company’s new baby is the Magellan Concorde, and is the latest addition to its Magellan range of switching systems. It was previewed at the usually sleepy Western Cable Conference annual get-together of the US cable television industry, which was a hive of announcements at last week’s staging in Anaheim, California. One way in which Northern Telecom hopes to woo carriers is by enabling them physically to separate switch components, while enabling them to be jointly administered and managed from a remote site. This will give operators maximum flexibility as broadband multimedia networks evolve, says the Canadian. Northern Telecom claims that Concorde supports Asynchronous Transfer Mode UNI access at E3, 155Mbps and 622Mbps rates, and that Asynchronous Transfer Mode trunking is supported at 155Mbps and 622Mbps rates. And 2.4Gbps interfaces are also planned, says the company, although no timetable has been announced. Connections to Synchronous Digital Hierarchy transmission systems, such as Northern Telecom’s own FiberWorld products, are handled through intra-office optical facilities and support standard line, section and path monitoring features. Concorde’s network management system supports Synchronous Digital Hierarchy management capabilities and Open Systems Interconnection support to other management systems, and it is engineered to interface with co-axial, fibre optic and copper cable, as well as with wireless access technologies. The company claims that it also incorporates a standards-based traffic and services management capability encompassed in Northern Telecom’s Multiple Priority System, which optimises traffic efficiency based on user-defined priorities for specific network applications. It will be not be available until the first half of 1995 so there are no prices as yet.
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