Hitachi Cable, Ltd. has announced the development of the Apresia18020 Ethernet switch (notes 1 and 2), a device that provides a capacity of 1.8 Tbit/sec, the highest capacity achieved to date in Japan by such a device. The switch will be available from December 2005.

Networks linking corporate locations have shifted from traditional leased-line services to Wide Area Ethernet, which costs less while providing higher speed and higher capacity. Today, wide-area Ethernet networks handle not only Web and e-mail traffic and file transfers, but a wide range of other high-volume traffic, including backbone data, IP phone voice, and video conferencing and other image data.

At the same time, FTTH services based on fiber optics are rapidly becoming the norm in private households. Thanks to its capability to handle greater data volumes with speed than conventional ADSL services, FTTH makes available, over the same line, Internet, IP phone, and image delivery services - commonly referred as the triple-play combination.

Given these trends, carriers must meet ever-increasing demands by expanding the capacity of core (aggregated) switches for wide-area Ethernet and FTTH networks while implementing the access control required to handle the complex prioritization of diverse data. And more so than ever before, information networks, which are rapidly approaching the status of commercial and societal lifelines, must provide assured reliability.

Hitachi Cable developed the Apresia8000 Series in 2003 as edge switches for wide-area Ethernet networks, targeting telecommunications carriers in particular as customers. Equipped with EoE (note 3) technology - now a de facto standard - ahead of all others in the industry for improved wide-area Ethernet network reliability, the Apresia8000 Series offers other advantages as well, including MMRP2 (note 4), Hitachi Cable's original high-speed failure switching function, and band control functionality - features that make it a milestone product. The Apresia8000 Series has been evaluated highly.

As the recently developed top-end flagship model of the Apresia8000 Series, the Apresia18020 is projected to serve as a core switch for wide-area Ethernet networks and, in the near future, as a core switch for FTTH networks. With its switching capacity of 1.8 Tbit/sec, the highest figure achieved to date in Japanese manufacturers, the Apresia18020 also offers access control features that make it possible to implement sophisticated band and priority control on a subscriber or application basis in response to data diversification and increasing traffic. For added reliability, approximately 90% of switching capacity is retained in the case of a switch fabric (note 5) failure, minimizing the impact on the overall network. The Apresia18020 Series also inherits the well-received EoE and MMRP2 features from the 8000 Series. Switches in the Apresia18020 Series incorporate low-power consumption parts, providing the highest functionality of low-power devices in its class, even with full implementation of 10 Gbps interfaces.

By adding the Apresia18020 to our lineup, we seek to strengthen our presence in the Ethernet switch market and to broaden sales of the Apresia Series. We project sales of 10 billion yen for the fiscal year 2007.

Notes:
1.	Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox Corporation.
2.	Apresia is a registered trademark of Hitachi Cable, Ltd.
3.	An acronym for Ethernet-over-Ethernet, EoE refers to functionality implemented on edge switches that accommodate subscriber lines, which encapsulates frames from subscriber networks, adds an edge switch MAC address, extended VLAN tag and TTL (Time To Live) value for loop prevention, and relays data among carrier networks using MAC addresses.
4.	An acronym for Multi Master Ring Protocol version2, MMRP2 is a proprietary Hitachi Cable high-speed switching feature intended to respond to failures in L2 Ethernet Rings.
5.	Switch fabric refers to a mechanism for ensuring high-volume traffic exchange between transmission and reception interfaces in a device.