3/13/2006 -- Cisco Systems Inc. last week announced a number of hardware and software upgrades for its ONS 15454 MSTP, including 10G muxponders, support for 40G wavelengths and alien lambdas, and a metro planning tool.

Cisco officials say the new upgrades enhance service aggregation, scalability and management capabilities for customers. Analysts say that's about right.

"Broad enhancements aimed at increasing the platform's aggregation, scalability and service management capabilities help to make Cisco's ROADM product more versatile in the face of emerging carrier requirements," writes Jason Marcheck, a principal analyst for optical infrastructure with consultancy Current Analysis Inc. "At the same time, many of the claimed upgrades have appeared in Cisco's marketing materials for the past few quarters, which could mean that the new features might not be 'news.'"

News or no, the deliverables are important to Cisco, which faces increasing competition in the ROADM market. In this respect, Marcheck argues, the array of new ONS 15454 enhancements help "position the 15454 MSTP as a technology leader in the ROADM space." The upgrades also help quash speculation -- or competitor-fomented FUD -- that Cisco isn't all that serious about the optical space. "[W]ith speculation floating around concerning Cisco's commitment to the optical infrastructure market, a set of product upgrades to its ROADM platform sends the message that Cisco, indeed, remains committed to optical," he notes.

The upgrades also help put an end to speculation -- or, again, competitor-fomented FUD -- that the ONS 15454 MSTP isn't quite up to snuff ROADM-wise. "Without question, the product enhancements to Cisco's ONS 15454 MSTP make it a full-featured ROADM offering," Marcheck argues, citing improvements such as a 10Gbps data muxponder, a 2.5 ESCON muxponder, and the ability to provision 32 channels of transport capacity in L-band spectrum, which collectively "give carriers a flexible set of options for aggregating traffic and keeping up with increasing traffic demands."

That's not all, either. Direct alien lambda support -- which Marcheck describes as "the ability to provision non-ONS-enabled wavelengths for transport over the 15454 MSTP" -- helps make that product a more interoperable play. "Finally, the introduction of a metro planner tool helps to automate the provisioning of ONS-based networks, reducing the requirement for trial-and-error network engineering exercises," he concludes. "All in all, the enhancements to Cisco's 15454 MSTP allow the American vendor to meet -- and in some cases exceed -- most feature set claims made by competing vendors for their metro core ROADM solutions." -Stephen Swoyer