10/31/2005 -- At last week’s Telecom ’05 trade show, Cisco Systems Inc. announced a bevy of enhancements for its ONS 15454 platforms, Catalyst series, 7600 series routers and 12000 series routers. Of course, Cisco wasn’t completely taken up with improving the lot of its existing products. The networking giant also announced an altogether new family, the ME 3400 Series Ethernet Access Switches.

Optimized for both residential triple-play and business VPN services, analysts say the new ME 3400 Series switches address a gap within Cisco’s existing product portfolio by providing a network equipment building services (NEBS)-based platform to deliver triple-play services to business and residential customers in the last mile. "The ME 3400 supports many auto-provisioning features and security functionalities to allow it to be deployed to support multiple business class users from a common platform," writes Jeff Ogle, a principal analyst for carrier infrastructure with consultancy Current Analysis Inc.

At the same time, Ogle concedes, the ME 3400 "does not represent a major breakthrough in price performance."

For the most part, however, he likes what he sees in Cisco’s Telecom ’05 product blitz. "The other enhancements are also important because they are all geared towards improving the range of port types and densities of existing optical and edge routers, thus extending product lifecycles and improving the overall competitiveness of Cisco’s Carrier Ethernet Solution," says Ogle.

Ogle does think that Cisco is flirting with competitive disadvantage in at least one respect, however, if only because rivals like Alcatel might be able to generate FUD at Cisco’s expense. "Competitors ... will position this announcement as evidence of Cisco playing catch-up with its platform’s features and functions in order to deliver a true end-to-end triple-play service to its customers," Ogle writes. "Cisco seems to be following the Alcatel lead in the sense of having purpose-built platforms optimized for a particular network segment to provide the best overall value for triple-play delivery."

There are advantages to such an approach, of course, Ogle acknowledges. "This end-to-end product architecture also facilitates the implementation for provisioning and OAM, with a strong network management system to ease integration into back office billing and support systems. Architecturally, it also enables a carrier or service provider to push the edge of the IP/MPLS tunnel opening closer to the customer, but it remains to be seen if this is desirable from the service provider’s stand point, or if it will create additional configuration and trouble shooting issues." -Stephen Swoyer