eSwitch hits 800G aggregate in production at a European carrier

A tier-2 European operator has completed its migration of an aggregation layer to eSwitch, sustaining line-rate 800G of aggregate throughput through evening peak with zero dropped microbursts across the first quarter in production.

The operator had been running a legacy chassis platform that was approaching end-of-life, with an expensive refresh on the horizon. Rather than buy the next generation of the same architecture, its engineering team evaluated a disaggregated approach.

Cutover without a maintenance weekend

The team migrated aggregation node by node, keeping the legacy platform live in parallel until traffic had shifted. Because eSwitch runs standard EVPN and SRv6, it slotted into the existing fabric without changes to the core.

"We expected to trade some reliability for flexibility. We got both — the microburst handling is actually better than the box it replaced."

Over the first quarter, the platform held sub-microsecond forwarding latency at peak and absorbed incast events that had previously required careful buffer tuning. In-band telemetry gave the team per-flow visibility they hadn't had before.

What's next

The operator is now evaluating Elastic BNG to disaggregate its subscriber-management layer as well, moving toward a single cloud-native access edge managed as one system.