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January 10, 2012

Beyond Capacity

As 2012 dawns for carriers, the demand from their customers for data has never been so fierce. The good news is that there are no more excuses as to why carriers can’t deliver access to the data-intensive applications that their customers need—whenever and wherever they need it. With the networking industry’s leap to 100 Gbit/s transport and the emergence of tailored 100G solutions for both core and metro deployments, unprecedented capacity is available wherever carriers and their customers need it across the network.

And, yet, for carriers, it’s not just a question of capacity. Carriers require sophisticated capabilities for network automation, demarcation and monitoring and synchronization and timing—in addition to state-of-the-art capacity—to properly support today’s range of demands on their networks, to keep costs in check and to keep fickle customers happy.

Unprecedented Automation

Carriers crave simplicity. Networks must work right out of the box, and the provisioning of new services—lighting up entire cities, even—must be as easy as the touch of a button. With comprehensive network automation—automated provisioning, protecting and restoring—new levels of operational efficiency and simplicity are possible.

The key here is seamless interoperability between the Internet Protocol/Multi-Protocol Label Switching (IP/MPLS) and transport layers, and the primary building blocks to achieving such a state of unification are software-programmable transceivers and reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexing (ROADM) technology. Service-aware interfaces and Generalized MPLS (GMPLS) control planes allow for automated, end-to-end inventory, discovery, reservation and setup of optical circuits, and multi-degree, contentionless and colorless ROADMs enable any service, via any port and any optical-fiber wavelength, to be delivered in any direction across the carrier infrastructure. Service provisioning becomes point-and-click, with the configuration of routers and transport equipment between network destinations carried out in automated fashion.

The result is an “agile core,” conveying to the carrier unparalleled flexibility, optical infrastructure-as-a-service applications and optimized utilization of resources.

Demarcation and Monitoring

 

Today’s carrier can afford no blind spots in its network. Carriers must understand what their networks are doing at all times—and know that their customers are receiving the services that they are paying for. Intelligent optical demarcation and service monitoring at handoff points between carrier networks or between carrier and customer networks can deliver such visibility and assurance.

With the ability to assess the quality of service provided across multiple carrier regions and/or all the way to access equipment or customer device, carriers can glean key knowledge about when signal degradations or outages occur and, hopefully, isolate and resolve service issues before customers notice them.

In fact, intelligence about the network and services might well be a carrier’s most important competitive weapon. A sophisticated capability for demarcation and monitoring capability can prove to be invaluable for helping carriers offer differentiated services and keep their most demanding customers satisfied.

Synchronization and Timing

With mobile migrating to LTE and 4G services, synchronization has moved to the forefront of carriers’ concerns. Timing is everything in mobile backhaul. And while the capability could be taken for granted in the not-so-old-days when carriers would rely on legacy, synchronous T1s wherever they needed synchronization, those days are quickly passing.

The boom in mobile data services has forced carriers in many cases to run (and maintain) separate networks for backhauling from cell tower to Carrier Ethernet core—the easier-, cheaper-to-scale Ethernet infrastructure for the service traffic itself and legacy Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) connections in order to support timing. The long-term operational costs of such a strategy, however, are untenable.

Packet innovation has presented compelling alternatives. IEEE 1588v2 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) is designed to maintain timing accuracy even as timing messages arrive asynchronously at their destinations after travelling router to router across an infrastructure. ITU-T Synchronous Ethernet (SyncE), meanwhile, is intended to bring to packet networking the same timing characteristics that legacy Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) offers in the circuit world. Its accuracy is excellent in end-to-end, SyncE-based infrastructures, but it is rarely the case that every connection in a mobile-backhaul network is SyncE-compatible. And SyncE does not deliver some functions that PTP provides—it is designed for frequency synchronization only.

Consequently, carriers require the flexibility to draw from multiple timing techniques, depending on factors such as specific application demands and network-segment characteristics, because the quality of timing and synchronization built into a packet backhaul network will directly impact the quality of mobile voice, video and data services that can be provided.

Conclusion

Carriers must be able to move more data faster than ever before. From mission-critical enterprise data to high-definition video, from data-center connectivity to cloud computing and mobile backhaul, the demand for bandwidth has never been so great.

But networking brawn alone won’t determine the carrier world’s winners and losers in the new year and beyond. With 100G firmly established as networking’s new table stakes, the carriers with the most mature capabilities in areas such as network automation, demarcation and monitoring and timing and synchronization will have the opportunity to most efficiently meet bandwidth demand, provide differentiated services and build the best business models.

For more on this topic, click the video below.



Want to learn more about 4G wireless technologies? Then be sure to attend the 4GWE Conference, collocated with TMC’s ITEXPO East 2012taking place Jan. 31-Feb. 3 2012, in Miami, FL. The 4GWE Conference provides unmatched networking opportunities and a robust conference program representing the wireless ecosystem. The conference not only brings together the best and brightest in the wireless industry, it actually spans the communications and technology industry. To register, click here.

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Brian Protiva is CEO of ADVA Optical Networking. To read more of Brian's articles, please visit his columnist page

Edited by Carrie Schmelkin


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