• Programmability. What level of flexibility is required?
• Processing. How many operations and table look-ups per packet? Is wirespeed performance critical?
• Power. What’s the power budget? Can the device bring the right performance per watt?
• Price. Level of integration (embedded memories, traffic management, etc.) has a huge impact on the bill-of-material, which ultimately defines the manufacturing cost and the margin for the target system.

Once coined by Jerome McCarthy and later made famous by Philip Kotler, the right marketing mix for a company can be modelled by another group of Ps: product, price, promotion and place. Kotler later added a couple of other Ps.  Is there anything missing in the ‘four P’ model for packet processing decision making?

Per Lembre demonstrates 100G

Over four weeks, we are visiting 40 customers and partners to demonstrate our new technology.  Many of them have said this is the first time they have actually experienced a demonstration of wirespeed processing at 100G in a single chip.

Here are some of my reflections this far:

• 100G is hot. With the finalization of the 100GE and 40GE standards, there is a huge interest to scale packet processing to the next level. 100G wirespeed network processors that can match the new step in link capacity will be critical to the commercial success of 100GE.
• Greater port densities in next generation fiber access systems. Xelerated’s OLT and unified fiber access customers are pushing to get the next generation systems to market as soon as possible. Service providers, primarily in Asia, are driving the need for more bandwidth and customized features to fit local market conditions.
• Power reduction is critical. In several meetings, our customers indicated that the HX and AX technology can reduce the power consumption with more than 50% compared to a competitive solutions. This has implications for both the environment and the operational cost of running the networks. Reduction in power consumption also enables new types of designs that are more efficient and require a smaller footprint.
• Wirespeed by Design. We use this term as a tag line for the company.  Through these meetings, I now realize just how well it resonates with our customer base. The dataflow architecture enables wirespeed packet processing without degradation when all services are turned on. It simplifies engineering, and our customers gain time to market. In addition, they are assured the products will come out well in performance tests.

The demo tour marks an important milestone for many of our customer design projects. The huge increase in demand on Reference Design Kits and the intensive customer correspondence on technical requirements are two safe signs of what’s ahead of us. It will be a lot of work, and a lot of fun!

By the way, we invited Craig Matsumoto at Light Reading to see the world’s first 100G demo. It all went very well, as expected, however there was initial confusion about bitrates and packet rates for 100Gbps Ethernet wirespeed. Please refer to the comment section to the blog post for more details.

According to Point Topic, Asia now accounts for nearly 40% of all broadband subscribers.  Not to mention, the region outperformed the sum of all other regions in terms of net subscriber additions last year. With China, Japan and South Korea leading the way, other Asian countries are growing fast, but from a smaller base. The Philippines grew 60% last year, and India 40%(!).

China passed the 100 million subscriber milestone in the fourth quarter last year, and the pace of growth is not slowing down. There is no doubt these numbers have a profound impact on how the industry is being shaped in support for the emerging fiber-based broadband market.

Today’s hotbed for fiber-to-the-home/basement (FTTx) deployments is clearly Japan and China. Already half of the broadband users in Japan are connected on FTTx, with China catching up fast. Europe and North America are lagging behind. But for how long?

Learning from copper-based broadband evolution, the amount of competition is fundamental to the pace of deployment. US end users are probably the ones that should welcome today’s news, regardless if they are based in an area that will be covered by the future Google FTTx service.

It’s always hard to imagine the uptake and requirements for future services. By its very nature, the future is unpredictable. Will HDTV take off? Will consumers ever want to narrate their own interactive movies in high definition? Or will they rather just lay back in the sofa and watch IPTV on the big-screen TV? The answers to these questions will have strong traffic planning implications.

Let’s look at what others are predicting. The FTTH council has compiled a list of broadband forecasts  in a response to an inquiry about the U.S. National Broadband Plan:

• Heavy Reading concludes that households will need 100 Mbps downstream (actual delivered throughput) by 2015.
• Bain & Co’s estimates the average U.S. household will require 30+ Mbps of download bandwidth, but points out that this requirement will move up to 100 Mbps over time.
• Motorola mirrors Bain & Co estimates. Within seven years, service providers need to plan for this figure to top 100 Mbps of actual throughput.

It looks like the industry will broadly accept the 100 Mbps target. How to measure the success, however, is likely to differ. Additionally, when looking at historic growth in broadband bandwidth, 100 Mbps is a reasonable goal for the next 5-10 years. The Swedish Government is aiming for this in its national broadband plan. The objective is to have 40% of Swedish housholds and companies connected at 100 Mbps by 2015, and 90% in 2020. Aggressive? Yes. Probable? Why not?

Yet another statistical proof point that copper-based services are on a downhill slope. The pace of change to fiber seems to be faster than many of us have expected.

Building up to the conference, Stan Hubbard, Heavy Reading’s Carrier Ethernet analyst, yesterday announced some encouraging new market data about the Carrier Ethernet Access Equipment. And it is booming.

The Carrier Ethernet Access market grew at 12 percent quarter-to-quarter in Q2 2009, and is up 17 percent year-over-year to $935 million in the rolling four-quarter period ending in the second quarter.

Most of the Carrier Ethernet access players will be at Light Reading Ethernet Expo. I look forward to some interesting discussions and will return with a report.

Investments horizons are long, and there is a need to build trust and long-term commitments to the regulatory framwork for this industry. In the mean time it makes sense to design networks and platforms with programmable software and hardware, enabling alignment to different operational models. ECI is doing the right thing!

It will be interesting to watch service provider statements on this topic.