Cisco unleashes power-over-Ethernet
Published: 31 Mar 2003 09:05 BST
Cisco is expected to unveil several upgrades for one of its more popular products on Monday, the Catalyst 6500 line of switches.
Most of the enhancements are geared toward making the switches faster. About 100,000 companies use the Catalyst 6500 switches to create networks out of personal computers, telephones, giant data centres and other equipment, said Cisco vice president Soni Jiandani.
The upgrades are a sign of possible new features to come for Cisco's other products, said Joel Conover, principal analyst at Current Analysis. "This is their Cadillac platform; all the features appear here first, and they trickle down to all Cisco products," he said.
One of those features is a circuit board that Cisco says will give the ability to send both electrical power and 1Gbps data transmissions over the same connection. This equipment could dramatically affect how corporations view Wi-Fi and voice over IP (VoIP), which is the merger of office telephone and computer networks, Conover said.
So-called "power-over-Ethernet" (POE) now runs on data highways moving too slow -- about 100Mbps -- for corporations to make a worthwhile investment into a VoIP phone system, Conover said. Most companies aren't taking advantage of POE's main benefit: not needing an electrical outlet.
"The market has been screaming for this, and Cisco just married those two things together," Conover said.
Among the more notable updates is Cisco's new supervisor engine, which costs $28,000 (£17,765). The engine, available now, doubles the traffic that the Catalyst 6500 can manage, Jiandani said.
The seven other upgrades, ranging in price from $7,000 to $60,000, will be available in the next few months, he said.
Switches are at the core of any digital network, from the Internet itself to an office phone system. Switches and routers work in tandem to ferry digital information from one place to the next. For instance, a phone call to an office usually first encounters a router, which attaches instructions to direct it to the right place. The switch finishes the job.
Cisco dominates the markets for switches and routers, but more so for switches. While other companies have made in-roads into Cisco's router market share, Cisco continues to sell about 70 percent of the world's switches, a lion's share of a market that generated $12 billion in 2002. The sale of switches represented nearly half, about 42 percent, of all of Cisco's revenue last year.
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