Telecom Platform Deployment Featured Article

According to a good online FAQ by Dave Lorusso on the topic, NEBS stands for "Network Equipment-Building System.” It’s an environment of a typical Regional Bell Operating Company Central Office.

Now this description includes spatial and environmental criteria. Typical equipment line-ups, according to Lorusso, are described including the environment they're exposed to.

It was developed, as so many other wonderful things were, by Bell Labs (News - Alert) back in the 1970s, back when it was considered the state of the art technological playground. The purpose was to standardize equipment that would eventually be installed in a CO, whereas the intent was “to make it easier for a vendor to design equipment compatible with a typical RBOC CO.”

The idea is that this would result in lower development costs and ease the equipment's introduction into the network. And as Lorusso explains, the main Bellcore document is GR-63-CORE, Network Equipment-Building System (NEBS) Requirements: Physical Protection.

This document, as Lorusso says, identifies the minimum spatial and environmental criteria used for new telecommunications equipment to be used in an RBOC's CO. The spatial criteria covers cable distribution systems, distributing and interconnecting frames, power equipment, operations support systems and cable entrance facilities.

The environmental criteria covers temperature and humidity, fire resistance, equipment handling, earthquake, office vibration & transportation vibration airborne contaminants, acoustic noise and illumination.

Recently TMC’s (News - Alert) Stefania Viscusi wrote that as the demand for network security, multi-gigabit processing, and traffic management increases today, products that incorporate intelligent packet processors and that can increase efficiency and performance, have become critical.

While a number of companies have created pieces and parts to address this need, ensuring their interoperability, reliability and host of other factors has forced users to look for a better option.

Partnering with a provider who can handle these issues will shorten time-to-market and ease deployment and service issues.