Maryland USA’s optical specialist Ciena this week launched a new disaggregated router product, called WaveRouter, which it claims is the first purpose-built router offering for converged metro. This will take the $3.6 billion company head-to-head with giants like Cisco, Juniper, Nokia and Huawei. The move allows Ciena to push the product like a switching fabric, and use it as a building block to huge metro scale. Consumers have been shifting to applications which use more bandwidth such as cloud-based services, streaming video and online gaming, which this will help accommodate. WaveRouter combines IP and optical coordination, has open API-based automation, and offers redundant power and cooling, along with the ability to independently scale up compute and switching fabric. Ciena says…