Cisco's new Network Convergence System can scale up with data demands

Cisco on Tuesday announced its latest "innovation" which it think "will do to cellular networks what smartphones did to communication".

The Cisco Network Convergence System (NCS) is an evolved programmable network that would be able to scale up and scale down as needed, depending on the pressures of data traffic.

In a web interaction with journalists, Cisco's senior director, service provider products & solutions, Sanjeev Mervana, said the new architecture can break existing silos and drive new monetisation opportunities.

"The NCS network fabric family is designed to help service providers handle rapidly increasing volumes of Internet traffic in cloud, mobile, video and machine-to-machine applications. It is built for petabyte scales and is capable of supporting trillions of events across the connected fabric," he said.

While service providers like Telstra in Australia have implemented NCS, Mervana said a full adoption will depend on the existing infrastructure of the service provider as well as their requirements.

Sanjay Rohatgi, MD, service provider sales at Cisco India and SAARC, said this was the only way for companies to future-proof their networks. "They have to start converging their networks and connecting to the network fabric to start reducing costs of delivering the service," he said.

Mervana added that NCS is about 45 per cent cheaper that existing systems.

Cisco is already in discussion with India service providers.