The company started high-bandwidth fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) trials in April 2009 and selected Cisco’s product as the edge platform to support the new services. After the successful trial period Swisscom is now rolling FTTH out to every home in the country.
It offers triple-play service bundles, enabling the simultaneous use of up to three HDTV channels, Internet connections of 50Mbps downstream and 5Mbps upstream, and telephone services.
Swisscom claims that it selected Cisco’s platform because of the roadmap laid out by the company, which promised to support Swisscom’s future bandwidth needs and protect its IP Next Generation Network (NGN) infrastructure investment.
“With the Cisco ASR 9000, we gain significant technological, operational and financial advantages,” said Guido Garrone, CTO, Swisscom. “The Cisco ASR 9000 provides the capacity for network bandwidth growth and the necessary quality of service capabilities for our triple-play service offerings, and it helps us to simplify network operations in extending the Cisco IOS XR operating system from the Cisco CRS-1 core to the Metro Ethernet aggregation layer.”
Global IP traffic is increasing at a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46%, nearly doubling every two years. Cisco says that this will result in an annual bandwidth demand on the world’s IP NGNs of more than half a zettabye. A zettabyte is equal to 1 trillion gigabytes, 1,000 exabytes, or 250 billion DVDs.
“Swisscom is investing in the broadband future of every household and business in Switzerland, and the Cisco ASR family fulfils the performance and energy-efficiency demands of world-class, next-generation FTTH platforms,” said Patrice Haldemann, head of FTTH rollout and access, Swisscom.
Kelly Ahuja, senior vice president and general manager, Service Provider Routing Technology Group, Cisco said: “In 2005, Swisscom decided to build the foundation for its future on the Cisco CRS-1 carrier routing technology. With Cisco CRS-1 systems in its core network and Cisco ASR series routers at the network edge, Swisscom is well-equipped to address the demands of the zettabyte era.”
The ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Router was launched by Cisco in November 2008 and designed to deliver up to 6.4 terabits per second total capacity. As websites and applications that eat up bandwidth, such as YouTube and Spotify, become more popular the strain on the world’s networking infrastructure will increase. The ASR 9000 can deliver performance that is capable of streaming HD video into every house in Los Angeles simultaneously.
