Triple-Play Residential Services
TPACK SMARTPACK Solutions can be used to support various deployment scenarios for Triple-Play Residential Services.
Triple-Play Residential Services combine voice, video and data services over a single connection to each household. These services can be provided a number of media, but chiefly over copper twisted-pair, using Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology, and fibre using either active Ethernet or Passive Optical Network (PON) technology. It should also be noted that coaxial cable and Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) networks owned by television cable companies are also competing aggressively for this market.
No matter the technology used to provide the Triple-Play Residential Service to each home, the backhaul connection to aggregation points is now pre-dominantly based on Ethernet. Aggregating this traffic and efficiently transporting it over telecom networks for further processing is a crucial task requiring support of both existing and new transport infrastructures.
TPACK SMARTPACK Solutions can be used to implement this aggregation function in existing or new equipment in support of multiple transport options. Some examples are:
- Ethernet over NG-SONET/SDH
- Ethernet over IP/MPLS
- Ethernet over Connecttion Oriented Packet Transport (PBB-TE/PBT & T-MPLS)
- Ethernet VLAN switching
The SMARTPACK NG-SONET/SDH Solution combines Packet Mapping using ITU-T define Generic Framing Procedure (GFP), Virtual Concatenation (VCAT) and Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS) to efficiently transport packet data over existing SONET/SDH infrastructure. See more here.
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In the diagram above, the TPACK SMARTPACK NG-SONET/SDH Solution is shown, which combined a Carrier Packet Engine (e.g. TPX3000) with an Ethernet over NG-SONET/SDH Paket Mapper (e.g. TPW192-S). This allows support for Ethernet, but also IP/MPLS and VPLS efficiently transported over existing SONET/SDH networks. This solution can be implemented on a linecard for a Multi-Service Provisioning Platform (MSPP) or a pizzabox solution, such as a microMSPP.
The TPACK Carrier Packet Engine can also be used to establish pseudowire and VPLS connections over IP/MPLS networks should this be required. This is typical in networks with wide deployment of routers.
The TPACK Carrier Packet Engine can also be used to implement VLAN switching mechanisms. In many Triple-Play Residential Service implementations, a VLAN is assigned per customer in the access network, while a VLAN is assigned to each service in the metro network. This demands manipulation of these VLANs at the aggregation node mapping each customer's residential service to the correct metro service VLAN.
This concept is taken still further using VLAN switching as mechanism for scaling the network to accomodate large amounts of data traffic. This concept is also fully supported by the TPACK Carrier Packet Engine.
Alternatively, Connection Oriented Packet Transport technologies, such as PBT/PBB-TE and T-MPLS can be used as an alternative to SONET/SDH. These technologies are designed to resemble SONET/SDH in behaviour with:
- End-to-end tunnels
- Provisioned and traffic engineered using a central management system
- End-to-end monitoring using Operation, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) packets
- End-to-end sub-50 msec protection switching to a pre-defined backup tunnel
This allows a smooth migration exploiting the familiarity of SONET/SDH operation and procedures, but adding the scalability and flexibility of packet.
The SMARTPACK PBT and SMARTPACK T-MPLS solutions are based on a TPACK Carrier Packet Engine implementation (e.g. TPX3100) that can include support for IP/MPLS, VPLS and pseudowires allowing encapsulation of this type of traffic over Connection Oriented Packet Networks.