Huawei Unveils the World's First 200G High-Speed Line Card for Routers

Huawei, a leader in providing next-generation telecommunications network solutions for operators around the world, today announced the launch of the world’s first 200G line card for high-end routers. This high-performance line card strengthens Huawei’s high-end router clustering capabilities and will enable operators worldwide to deploy ultra-broadband networks over which users can enjoy high-quality cloud computing, mobile broadband, and HD video services.
Cloud computing and network virtualization are challenging legacy service channels. Operators are therefore in great need of larger-capacity and higher-efficiency “golden” service channels to ensure premium service experience. The deployment of this 200G line card enables higher network and power efficiency for operators to effectively increase bandwidth, while reducing operation and maintenance (O&M) costs. By using Huawei’s self-developed Solar chipsets, including its high performance forwarding engine chipset, switch fabric chipset, and traffic management chipset, in tandem with new-generation energy-saving technologies such as MIP (Macro Instruction for Packet Processing), this innovative 200G line card is able to achieve line-rate forwarding of services and is able to maintain a minimum power consumption of less than 2.62 W per GE, which is significantly lower than the industry average.
Hu Kewen, president of Huawei’s Carrier IP Sub-Product Line, said, “Operators’ demands for larger-capacity ultra-broadband networks to carry high-value services are the catalyst behind our development of the 200G line card. Huawei is the only one in the industry to hold 200G core technologies and readily helps operators build sustainable, future-proof convergence networks.”
This 200G line card, consisting of a mother card and daughter card, will be delivered with two types: 2 x 100GE and 20 x 10GE. The mother card is backward compatible with the daughter cards of legacy 100G line cards, protecting customers’ investments and facilitating a smooth evolution from 100G to 200G. In addition, the mother card supports multiple hot-swappable daughter cards for operators to choose from.
When deployed on a Huawei NE5000E high-end router, the new line card enhances the port density to 256 100GE ports or 2560 10GE ports, and improves the forwarding capability of the “2+8” NE5000E cluster system to 50 Tbit/s. The new line card also enhances the bandwidth and cluster expandability of the NE5000E for each slot to meet operators’ requirements for network expansion.
Huawei’s IP products and solutions are providing services to the world’s leading operators including China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, British Telecom, Telefonica, SingTel, and Etisalat. According to a report from Ovum, a consulting firm, Huawei was ranked third in the world router market as of the fourth quarter of 2010.