Cisco makes major move in optical market

Start-up broadband provider Cambrian Communications is to take the kit to establish a network between New York and Washington. This will be the first appearance of Cisco's Wavelength Router - the product of its takeover of Monterey Networks last year.

The company is a major (70 per cent) contractor to the US' first Network Access Point to combine IP and optical technologies. BellSouth is building a network in Florida capable of Gigabit Ethernet to OC-192 and will be using a mixture of high-speed IP routers and Cisco optical switchers.

Cisco has piled into the optical network market in the last year with the $450m purchase of Monterey Networks and the purchase of Pirelli's optical unit. It has a long way to go with six per cent of the market to compare with Nortel's 38 per cent, Lucent's 14 per cent and Fujitsu's 12 per cent.