Charter to Beef Up Broadband
Looking to keep satellite broadcasters from poaching its analog cable subscribers, Paul Allen's Charter plans broadband expansion...with a little help from Cisco. (more)

Agere Touts High-Speed Switching Chip
The company's PI-40SAX switching chip transfers a minimum of 40 Gbps -- at least four times the speed of comparable single-chip switches. (more)

Venture Capital News

WaveSmith Closes $30 Million Round, Signs Reseller Pact with Ciena
Optical-networking firm WaveSmith Networks has closed a $30 million third round of financing, bringing the company's total amount raised to $84.5 million. New investors in the round include Argonaut Private Equity and Ciena Corp. First and second round investors Atlas Venture, Bessemer Venture Partners, Commonwealth Capital, and Fidelity Ventures, also participated in this latest round.

WaveSmith's latest round of financing will allow it to continue to scale sales, support and manufacturing, while at the same time grow the development team to continue to meet customer demands, officials said.

Ciena and WaveSmith have also entered into a worldwide reseller agreement that gives Ciena the ability to market, sell, and support WaveSmith's Distributed Node (DN) multiservice switch product family into Tier One service provider accounts. Ciena will furnish first level 7x24 support for WaveSmith's products via its network of technical assistance centers. The partnership gives WaveSmith a worldwide sales presence and the ability to further penetrate the large carrier accounts, officials said.

WaveSmith's DN multiservice platform is described as the first scalable product line that combines ATM, Frame Relay, Time-Division Multiplexing/Circuit Emulation Services (TDM/CES), and IP/Multiprotocol Label Switching (IP/MPLS) services in an ultra-compact form factor with telephony-grade reliability. The DN's WaveForm architecture supports any mix of multiservice edge and core networking technologies, enabling a migration that leverages existing infrastructure without a forklift upgrade. The DN increases today's service capacity at low cost and allows carriers to cap their legacy investment without disrupting services or overhauling the network. The DN 2100 and DN 4100 are optimized for remote edge and medium density edge applications while the DN 7100 is geared towards Central Office (CO) switching.

Product News

Mysticom Rolls Out Transceiver
Mysticom, a supplier of high-speed communication ICs, today announced the industry's first 10 Gigabit Ethernet PHY and backplane transceiver (MY3104) with integrated forward error correction (FEC). The MY3104 is based upon Mysticom's enhanced encoding scheme, which integrates forward error correction (FEC) on each channel (4 X 3.125 Gbps) and greatly improves the bit error rate (BER) to better than 10(-17) in very harsh backplane environments delivering a new class of performance.

The MY3104 extends system performance in Enterprise Switches, High-End Routers, Storage Area Networks, Metropolitan Area Networks, and Wireless Base Stations, officials said.

The new addition to Mysticom's 10Gbps family features Mysticom's unique Signal Quality Index (SQI), which continuously reports received signal quality, allowing link parameters to be tuned in response to changing environmental conditions. This results in optimized system performance. The MY3104 also offers a by-pass mode where the device can operate in 8B/10B mode compliant with the interoperability requirements of the 10G Ethernet networking standard.

Mysticom's MY3104 is housed in 256-ball (BGA) package and will be sampling in October of 2002. The MY3104 is fabricated in a standard 0.15u CMOS process and will be priced at $95 in limited quantities.

Tau Networks Delivers Enterprise/Metro Switch Fabric Chipset
Tau Networks, a new company delivering switch fabric chipsets for multiple communications and computing markets, announced sample availability of its T64 switch fabric chipset, comprising the TL2410 Line Interface and TX6410 Crossbar/Scheduler ICs.

Linearly scalable from 2.5 Gbps to 640 Gbps of true full-duplex bandwidth, the two-chip T64 delivers high-integration, protocol-independent switching with world-class Quality of Service/Class of Service support and high availability, at the lowest cost in the industry. From highly scalable enterprise LAN and SAN switches to multi-service MAN and WAN platforms, system OEMs can now achieve more revenue-generating ports, in fewer chips at a lower cost, officials said.

The T64 provides extensive redundancy capabilities, including 1:1 hitless dual-path as well as datacom-style (N+M) and graceful degradation (N-1) capability. Failover to backup paths is hardware-based and ultra-fast. The T64 supports seamless capacity increases or decreases, with no interruption in fabric operation, allowing end users to change redundancy schemes and fabric overspeed in real time, in the field, without bringing down the fabric or affecting traffic on other ports. True "pay as you grow" scalability and protocol independence allow OEMs to deploy common fabric designs across multiple product families, reducing development and inventory costs.

Volume pricing for a complete 10+ Gbps fabric port supporting 2x core overspeed and 1:1 hitless redundancy ranges from $250 to $350, depending on configuration.

Other News

Level 3 Inks Broadband Infrastructure Agreements
Level 3 Communications Inc. said it has signed broadband infrastructure agreements with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and London's City University.

Specifically, Caltech signed a 10-year IRU agreement for metropolitan dark fiber in Los Angeles. London's City University signed a three-year agreement for colocation and metropolitan dark fiber services in London.

Level 3 offers intercity and metropolitan dark fiber and colocation services in the U.S. and Europe. The company has constructed and operates local fiber networks in 27 U.S. and nine European markets, comprising more than 2,100 route miles and connecting more than 500 buildings, including carrier hotels, third-party colocation facilities and ILEC central offices. Level 3 sells dark fiber to government, financial, academic, and research institutions for high bandwidth needs that demand security, rapid deployment, and cutting edge technology.

Level 3 offers colocation services in 66 markets in the U.S. and Europe. Level 3's carrier-neutral data centers serve as portals to other communications networks as well as to the Level 3 backbone.

Velio and Ignis Optics Interoperate
Velio Communications, a developer of high-speed communications semiconductors, and Ignis Optics, which manufactures small form factor pluggable single mode optical transceivers, announced completion of interoperability testing between the Velio VC1021S Quad OC-48 transceiver and the Ignis IGP-2000 Series OC-48 SFP optical modules.

Velio's VC1021S Quad OC-48 transceiver is designed specifically for SONET/SDH physical layer applications. The device consists of four independent 2.488-2.670 Gbps SerDes, including CDRs. The device meets all of the Telcordia/ITU/Bellcore GR-253 standards for jitter requirements, consumes half the power and costs half as much as typical discrete OC-48 transceivers, and is ideal for cost reductions of existing multi-channel OC-48 line cards. The VC1021S interfaces to single or quad 2.5 Gbps optical transceivers. On the parallel side, the VC1021S communicates with Framers / Pointer Processors via 4- or 16-bit, parallel, clocked, 622 MHz, LVDS signals.