Written by: Peter Curtin and Bert Whyte

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In 1998, the Tigris family of products from ACC was named the data communication industry’s Hot Product of the Year. Ericsson’s acquisition of ACC, which was part of its string-of-pearls strategy, positions the company to migrate existing wireline and wireless customers toward IP communications and to build complete end-to-end network solutions based on the Internet protocol. The authors describe the Tigris family, which provides a gateway between circuit-switched and IP networks. Tigris’ flexible architecture allows traditional circuit-switched calls to enter or exit the world of IP. Its backplane provides for two bus architectures: standards-based TDM connectivity for more than one thousand five hundred 64 kbit/s circuit-switched connections, and a high-speed Compact PCI bus that offers up to 2 Gbit/s of bandwidth for packet-switched traffic. Combined with AccessOS software from Ericsson, this simple hybrid architecture creates a carrier-class multi-service and multi-delivery access platform.

[First published in Ericsson Review no. 02, 1999]