Cisco recently announced significant refresh for its ASR 9000 family, including high throughput (up to 1.2Tbs per slot and 20 slots per chassis for the ASR 9922), high density line cards (24x10 Gbs or 2x100 Gbs) and network virtualization (nV), which allows ASR 9000 components (including ASR 9922/9010/9006 cluster nodes and ASR 9000v aggregation and access nodes) to act and be managed as one device.
One of the early customers of the ASR 9000 is a Tier 2 cable multisystem operator (MSO) in the US with approximately 2 million subscribers. The MSO was facing several challenges delivering new services to its customers and was also dealing with increasing network congestion. With DOCSIS 3.0 deployment nearly 100 percent, it has been seeing large increases in residential data use. Also, the growing popularity of online/OTT video is driving additional demand and as with most other residential Internet service providers, 20–30 percent of its prime-time traffic is in OTT video. On the business side, the company is seeing greater demand for high bandwidth connectivity for mobile backhaul and metro Ethernet services.
The MSO realized that a move to an all IP converged network was the long-term solution that would enable it to offer higher speeds and differentiated services to residential and commercial customers. The company is aggressively pursuing this converged network architecture and is implementing a multiservice edge router as one of the key components. The MSO trialed the ASR 9000 and an edge router from another vendor and decided to standardize solely on the ASR 9000 for its rollout.
Click here to download the report.