Cisco today revealed the next step in its vision for a flattened internet infrastructure that includes a routed optical networking portfolio featuring Acacia pluggable optics.

The network infrastructure giant acquired Acacia Communications earlier this year, following a hard-fought battle over price, and eventually agreed to up its original and 18-month-old offer by 73% to $4.5 billion.

Cisco’s “internet for the future” framework also includes Cisco Silicon One, a programmable silicon architecture it first revealed in late 2019, converged SDN transport, and network automation. 

“The internet and most large scale networks have been built on a three-layer architecture for the last several decades, and what we’ve seen is that’s continued to just drive complexity, cost, and significant inefficiencies in how traffic is transported from point A to point B,” Jonathan Davidson, SVP and GM at Cisco’s Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group, told SDxCentral.

“Because this has been an incremental architectural shift, over the last several decades we’ve continued to build on top of complexity, and that has driven significant cost inefficiencies for service provider customers,” he said.

Network operators “are spending on average about $5 for managing infrastructure for every dollar they’re spending in actually acquiring infrastructure, and those ratios are only going to get worse as traffic continues to grow,” Davidson warned. 

“We’re trying to create a new architecture that simplifies the layers and enables a much more interoperable future that we’ve always had in IP that now we’re extending into the optical domain. We’re also proposing an architecture that over time you actually move optical services on top of IP. Today, IP runs on top of optical services,” he explained. 

Cisco claims it can achieve a 46% reduction in total cost of ownership for network operators that move down this architectural path. That path effectively collapses IP and optical networks with a routed optical networking portfolio that includes Acacia’s pluggable coherent optics and improvements in segment routing, and cloud services, according to the vendor.

Davidson, earlier this month, shared Cisco’s five-part strategy to reduce its customers’ IT costs, and today’s series of updates bolster that effort with Silicon One and Acacia playing a starring role.

Cisco’s Silicon One family now includes 10 chips that mark an expansion from a routing-focused platform to a web-scale switching chip capable of 25.6 Tb/s of throughput. Collectively, Cisco has decreased the amount of power required per 100-Gb/s on fixed systems by 50% and almost a third on modular systems, according to Davidson.

Webscalers, because they don’t offer a wavelength of light to enterprise customers and have instead architected their networks and clouds around packet connectivity, can migrate to this new architecture now.

“From a logical perspective, if everything is a packet service, that is the way to get the greatest amount of efficiency out of your fiber, and this is what’s really compelling,” Davidson said, adding that the redesign internet infrastructure translates to increased bandwidth and significant capex savings.

Modems are oftentimes used as connection devices that also amplify optical signals, but the router, in the second and third phase of this transition, becomes a connectionless modem, he explained. 

Some of Cisco’s early customers on this new internet infrastructure include Altibox, Eolo, Rakuten Mobile, SFR, Telia Carrier, and Telstra. 

For others, phase one of this journey involves ripping out optical transponder shelves and replacing those with Acacia’s pluggable transponders that plug into routers. That interim measure allows service providers to more properly depreciate existing optical assets and pursue the transition over a multi-year period, Davidson said. 

Cisco today also introduced the Cisco Cloud Native Broadband Network gateway for wireline telecom customers, added Silicon One Q200 chips to its 8000 Series Routers, and a portfolio of new line cards and chassis for other routers in its lineup.