Telecommunication Industry List telecommunication industry news, analysis & reviews

Cisco has enhanced its carrier Ethernet portfolio to extend fiber-to-the-home to multi-tenant units (MTUs) and extended its recovery time to 50 milliseconds from the core to the customer. "Service providers are trying to increase the experience of a consumer or business and are making the transition to become experience providers. To do that you cannot build a network by application; you need to bring the single, converged network which is primarily built on carrier Ethernet," said Suraj Shetty, senior director of marketing in Cisco's service provider business. "We are not only bringing Ethernet in the core or the edge of the network, but with this new announcement we're taking it all the way to a customer prem," Shetty said. "You can have an ME 3400 (carrier Ethernet platform) in the basement and serve up to 24 phones with a single unit with fiber connects right into the building. You can provide up to 100 meg capacity." To provide additional resiliency and quality in the network, Cisco is grandfathering some of the features of SONET or SDH networks and including them in the next-generation network (NGN) so "if there's a link failure it can be repaired within seconds and ... the second thing is fault isolation so if there's a problem I should be able to isolate the fault quickly and remedy it as soon as possible," he said. The product enhancements cross Cisco's customer base. Cisco is trying to bring a converged IP network that can bring different services to different devices. The difference in this case is how carrier Ethernet moves from the core to the edge to the premise. Cable and telcos are embracing Ethernet and moving it closer to the premise, although cable is still delivering at least the video portion of its services using RF and some telcos continue to use copper in the last mile.