New Products, Services Aim to Improve Ethernet Triple Play Networks

Responding to the rise of the triple-play era – bundling telephony, Internet and video/TV - many service providers have set in motion their plans to transform from a single IP network to one that delivers multiple services.

In doing so, service providers developing Ethernet-based triple-play services are facing a steady stream of business and technological issues (i.e. scalability, quality of service and high costs) that have made reliable delivery of the bundled service to residential and enterprise consumers a challenge.

Enter Nortel and Spirent Communications, both of which used the SUPERCOMM ’05 trade show in Chicago to announce their respective products and/or services designed to solve some of those problems.

Seeking to address scalability and cost issues, Nortel introduced two new products for its Metro Ethernet portfolio that, in addition to new Internet Protocol capability, provide a platform able to deliver triple-play services to customers using only one Ethernet infrastructure, according to a press release.

“While a variety of Ethernet services have been gaining in popularity in recent years, the costs associated with deploying services to a broad customer base over a resilient Ethernet infrastructure have hindered service provider build outs,” the release said. “Service providers have been faced with a difficult choice between service quality and network cost.”  

The new products, Nortel Metro Ethernet Routing Switch 8600 (ERS) and Nortel Metro Ethernet Services Unit 1850 (ESU), are designed to deliver video, voice or data over any port; the products also have the ability to securely separate end-user traffic for over 4,000 subscribers on every port. 

Nortel’s new products eliminate the necessity for separate Ethernet infrastructure for unicast and multicast services, thereby reducing the cost of providing the services, according to the release.

“The Nortel Metro Ethernet solution can handle multicast (broadcast video) and unicast (voice over IP, video on demand) traffic over a single, converged Ethernet infrastructure or in combination with PON or xDSL implementations,” the release said.

Additionally, up to 14 Metro ESU’s may be arranged in a ring topology extending from the ERS 8600, offering service providers with a “massively scalable Ethernet infrastructure that can support a variety of services such as Ethernet VPNs, IP-based triple-play, and 3G wireless backhaul.”

Meanwhile, Spirent Communications announced the availability of a test system, Converged Network Impairment Emulator (CNIE), for carriers developing triple-play service bundles.

The CNIE, which consolidates multi-dimensional tests onto one system, is designed to optimize quality by providing analysis of infrastructure, applications, security service and provisioning performance, according to a press release.

“ Service providers launching triple-play services need maximum confidence that their customers will experience the highest quality converged IP voice, video, and multimedia applications,” Mark Fishburn, vice president of technical strategy for Spirent Communications, said in a press release. “Spirent’s Converged Network Impairment Emulator greatly increases this confidence by providing the ability to emulate realistic impairments and test their impact under real world conditions over a set period of time.”