5/9/2005 -- Last month, Cisco Systems Inc. announced several new additions and enhancements to its Cisco 7600 Series routing portfolio.

At the time, the networking giant positioned its 7600 platform refresh as an important deliverable for its Next-Generation Networks (NGN) initiative, which Cisco has championed as a (potentially profitable) means to help service providers build out flexible IP networks capable of delivering video, voice and data (so-called “triple play”) services to customers.

According to some industry watchers, however, Cisco may have erred by not recasting the NGN-friendly 7600 Series as next-gen enough.

For the record, Cisco last month announced a new 7600 Series offering—the 7604 router—along with several new IOS enhancements for the 7600 Series. Missing, however, are new IOS-specific enhancements designed specifically for carriers and service providers.

The centerpiece of Cisco’s announcement was the new 7604 router, a four-slot, 5U device that—for a starting price of $34,000—includes chassis, supervisor engine and power supply. The 7604 can support a variety of different line cards, from DS-0 to OC-48/STM-16, along with conventional 10-base, 100-base or 1000-base Ethernet. And on the IOS front, Cisco announced new 7600 Series support for hierarchical Quality of Service (QoS), along with enhanced IP traffic prioritization/processing capabilities, and support for dynamic, multipoint VPN secure connectivity services.

The takeaway, says Erik Keith, a senior analyst for broadband infrastructure with consultancy Current Analysis, is a much-needed refresh of Cisco’s aging 7600 Series platform. “[Cisco] needed to roll out the 7604 platform in order to address the small PoP environments, and the related 7600 series enhancements to support burgeoning customer demand for bandwidth-intensive and secure connectivity services, which requires not only bigger pipes ... but also more advanced QoS and IP traffic prioritization/processing capabilities,” he writes.

This doesn’t mean Cisco is out of the woods, however. In fact, Keith suggests, its competitors could make marketing hay out of some of the choices it made in order to bring its new 7604 Series router to market. For starters, he asks, where’s IOS XR, the brand-spanking-new version of IOS Cisco introduced last year for its next-gen Carrier Routing System-1 (CRS-1)? Cisco has, after all, started to incorporate IOS XR features more broadly across its product portfolio, starting with its venerable 12000 Series routers.

“The XR upgrade is designed to address longtime carrier concerns regarding the ‘enterprise-centric’ focus of IOS, as well as match the modular software proposition of chief rivals,” he notes.

More to the point, the lack of IOS XR features might give more substance to competitor FUD regarding Cisco’s retooled 7600 Series, says Keith. “With the introduction of the 7604 platform, Cisco has effectively downsized larger 7600 series platforms into a horizontal-slot form factor to address smaller PoP environments. While customers are certain to deploy the 7604 en mass, rival vendors may characterize the 7604 as nothing more than ‘old Cisco technology’ in a smaller box, especially due to its lack of XR software.” -Stephen Swoyer