"Comcast's and Cisco's shared vision of integrated 10Gbps and 40Gbps DWDM interfaces was one of the key reasons for our selection of the CRS-1," said Vik Saxena, Comcast director of IP architecture, in a statement. "As we move to transport all services over IP, including broadcast video and video on demand, cost-effectiveness, scalability, reliability, and service flexibility become critical. By meeting these important needs, Cisco's CRS-1 is an ideal platform on which to base our service growth."

"With the majority of traffic on provider core networks moving to IP — manual provisioning and cross-connect devices can delay service deployment, be costly, with traditional deployment of transponders, and less flexible," said Eve Griliches, research manager, IDC. "Cisco is helping providers merge the intelligence of IP with DWDM while improving capital and operational efficiencies in their networks."

To help address and manage the traffic growth from video/IPTV, the Cisco IPoDWDM integration strategy features three key integration points, according to Cisco: Element Integration, Control Integration, and Management Integration.

• Element integration minimizes optical-electrical-optical conversions in the network to reduce expensive stand-alone transponders and complex electrical switching equipment. In 2004, Cisco introduced OC768c optical interfaces on the CRS-1, delivering 40Gbps trunking for high capacity terabit POPs and central offices and also launched its Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs), which integrate photonic switching into optical multiplexers. Building on its efforts to integrate IP and DWDM, Cisco today is introducing two new interfaces for the CRS-1 with integrated transponder functionality, enabling the CRS-1 to originate fully tunable International Telecommunications Union (ITU)-grid compatible colored wavelengths.
• Control integration is designed to enable providers to migrate from today's manual provisioning process to a dynamic service activation provisioning process. Building on is ROADM platforms, which enable the remote provisioning of optical wavelengths without a truck roll, Cisco announced the Segmentation model of GMPLS (S-GMPLS) available on the CRS-1.

  S-GMPLS is designed to leverage the power of GMPLS IP control protocols for auto-configuration of wavelengths while keeping the topology of the routing domain isolated from the topology of the DWDM domains, providing a way to deploy GMPLS while respecting organizational boundaries.

• Management integration provides flexible operating models designed to enable separate management of the IP and the DWDM equipment by separate operating groups, and, alternatively, to enable providers to deploy a unified management model to achieve operational cost efficiencies and reduce time to service deployment. The CRS-1 supports integration with third-party interfaces through XML and Simple Network Management Protocol.

"Network convergence through integration of core routing and DWDM transport offers service providers a number of practical and economic benefits while efficiently managing rapid growth of video traffic," said Tony Bates, senior vice president of carrier core and multiservice switching Business Unit for Cisco. "Driving these cost efficiencies and service flexibility is at the heart of the IP NGN strategy."

The Cisco CRS-1 routing system scales up to 92TB per second, according to the company. It also features continuous operation, IP/MPLS service flexibility, scalability, multicast capability for digital broadcast video and seamless optical integration.