Fujitsu Network Communications this week announced a few enhancements to its flagship product, the Flashwave 4500, including the introduction of resilient packet ring (RPR) technology and a boost in density.

For customers interested in RPR--a standards-based technology for combining the efficiency of Ethernet traffic with the resiliency of Sonet--FNC offers a choice of two new blades for its multiservice provisioning platform (MSPP): a dual-port blade with Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and a four-port blade with 10/100Base-T GigE interfaces.

FNC has had RPR functionality in its 4100--a smaller version of the 4500, deployed closer to the edge--for some time. Now the 4100 can share RPR ringlets with the 4500, allowing the 4500 to pick out the Ethernet traffic and hand it off to other devices without needing another 4100 in the central office.

FNC predicts particular demand for the RPR cards among the enterprise and wholesale entities among its carrier customers, but the vendor will also sell the RPR-enabled Flashwave directly to enterprises.

“The majority of the applications [for RPR] are in the enterprise, to minimize the cost of their LAN and larger network constructions,” said Ken Morris, FNC’s director of market development.

Last year, Infonetics Research predicted the North American RPR equipment market would grow 14% annually to $246 million by 2007. In 2003, the domestic market was worth $146 million.

FNC’s use of RPR may counter one of the historical criticisms of the technology, that it was most often offered by start-up vendors in whom major carriers had little trust. Some of those start-ups have since expired.

“With the large embedded Sonet networks [Bell carriers] have built over the years, this gives them an opportunity to be very efficient about deploying Ethernet services over an embedded infrastructure,” a FNC spokesman said.

When asked if RPR could clash with carriers’ plans to migrate their networks to MPLS, Morris said, “I think there’s a place for both.”

FNC is also upping the 4500’s density by offering a new dual-port OC-48 blade in addition to its existing single-port blades. With the new dual-port blades, each shelf in the 4500 can scale to 40 ports (with 20 cards) to handle 20 traffic rings. And with three shelves, each 4500 will be able to handle 60 rings, all with a common 300 Gb/s switch fabric.

FNC also introduced a DS-3 transmux card for the 4500, which grooms multiple DS-1s and hands them off as DS-3s. The move adds further fuel to the vendor’s year-old efforts to use its MSPP to challenge the crossconnect market. “This device can be very competitive as an optical edge device, yet you can deploy transmuxing at your service edge, in the core, and, as the system is built up, to basically replace a [digital crossconnect],” Morris said.