Allied Telesis has launched the x550 series of stackable 10 Gigabit Ethernet Layer 3 switches. Despite industry enthusiasm for 10 Gigabit Ethernet, many mid-market companies have found themselves unable to widely adopt the technology due to high cost, low port density and high power consumption. All x550 series switches support a flexible stacking model that allows the user to choose the speed and the media of the stacking link: 40G fiber or 10G fiber or 10G copper. If the user chooses 10G copper, then Cat6a can be used as the stacking cable, dramatically reducing the cost of building a resilient solution. Up to four units can be stacked, and stacks can be created over long-distance fiber links, making the x550 series the perfect choice for highly resilient, distributed aggregation or network cores supporting automated disaster recovery applications. In addition to providing a flexible, high performance aggregation solution, the x550-18XSPQ model will be an ideal solution for deploying 802.11ac Wave2 wireless networks. The combination of PoE+, delivering up to 30W per port, and 2.5G NBASE-T capability enables easy connectivity with maximum throughput for the latest high-speed wireless access points.