Spirit Communications deploys Alcatel-Lucent 7950 XRS core router

Systems house Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) says it has supplied its 7950 XRS (Extensible Routing System) core router to Spirit Communications for an upgrade of the service providers network in the U.S. southeast. The network upgrade will enable Spirit to support 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, and 100 Gbps IP connections.

Privately owned Spirit, which provides voice, data, and Internet services to customers in the Southeast, plans to turn up the new routers first in Charlotte, NC, Columbia, SC, and across areas of the Carolinas and Georgia. The operator targets businesses, carriers and government agencies; it also offers wholesale services to rural providers in North and South Carolina and Georgia.

Spirit will use the same 5620 Service Aware Manager (SAM) management system it currently uses for its 7750 MPLS systems to manage its new core routers (see "Alcatel IP service router scores with Spirit Telecom").

"The 7950 XRS platform from Alcatel-Lucent will provide Spirit Communications the capacity and scalability needed for our explosive Internet bandwidth demands," asserted Larry Sims, executive vice president, engineering and Operations at Spirit. "The high-density 10GbE XMAs [XRS media adapters], along with new chipsets supporting 400GbE, ensure that Spirit is implementing a solution that is efficient today and scalable well into the future for IP peering applications. In addition, the inherent knowledge of SROS [Service Router Operating System] from our 7750 MPLS core allows for reduced opex as we transition our Internet core to the 7950 XRS platform."

The 7950 offers up to 16 Tbps of switching capacity, depending upon the model (see "Alcatel-Lucent unveils 7950 XRS core routers"). Alcatel-Lucent recently added the option of support for 400 Gbps interfaces (see "Alcatel-Lucent offers 400-Gbps IP router interface").

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