Carrier Ethernet Access

In recent years, new industry standards have transformed Ethernet into a high speed transport method over metro and wide area networks and a widely-accepted, carrier-grade service suite. Layer 2 Ethernet services have become an attractive alternative to legacy leased lines and AT M or Frame Relay VPNs. This new breed of services enables simplified operations, higher throughput and better economics. At the same time, it requires clear demarcation at the customer premises to monitor and enforce SLA agreements, and to provide adequate service control using OAM capabilities.

RAD’s EtherAccess® strategy aims to provide REAL (Reliable, Economical, Accountable, and Limitless) Carrier Ethernet access, enabling easy Ethernet service deployment and ensuring a consistent customer experience, regardless of the available access technology. RAD’s EtherAccess product suite is designed to help service providers meet customer expectations for SLA accountability and verifiable performance for Carrier Ethernet services. This is achieved with built-in intelligent demarcation capabilities, including end-to-end network visibility with Ethernet OAM (operations, administration and maintenance) functionality, proactive performance measurement, granular QoS (quality of service), and advanced traffic management.

The standards-based EtherAccess product line is also certified by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), ensuring carrier-grade performance and third-party interoperability. By deploying the EtherAccess devices, carriers can optimize their Ethernet business services portfolio, costeffectively extending their network’s reach to as many customers as possible, while enhancing their offering with multiservice support, guaranteed priority per user and per service, and increased availability – over any available infrastructure.

RAD offers a comprehensive line of Ethernet access devices for extension, demarcation and concentration of Ethernet services over TDM networks. With rate versatility ranging from E1/T1 and bonded E1/T1 to STM-4/OC-12, RAD’s sophisticated EtherAccess product suite delivers seamless mid-band Ethernet, Fast Ethernet (FE) and Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) connectivity over PDH access circuits and SDH/SONET transport networks.

The RICi-16, for example, transports Fast Ethernet over up to 16 E1/T1 circuits or two bonded E3/T3 links, using next-generation Ethernet over PDH encapsulation with multi-virtual concatenation group (VCG) support. The GFP (generic framing procedure), VCAT (virtual concatenation) and LCAS (link capacity adjustment scheme) standard protocols allow service providers to dynamically allocate bandwidth to their customers by simply changing the number of E1 or T1 links bonded to the virtual group, enabling higher user throughput without the need to change the device or stop the service. In addition to its MEF-certified Ethernet services capabilities, it features flow and class of service (CoS)-based QoS attributes, with comprehensive Ethernet OAM and diagnostic tools.

The Egate-20 and Egate-100 serve as central solutions, enabling multi-site Carrier Ethernet aggregation from remote locations.

RAD enables carrier-grade Ethernet service delivery over fiber access with a variety of Ethernet network termination units (E-NTUs), media converters and Ethernet aggregators. The ETX and ETX-A Carrier Ethernet demarcation devices enable advanced rate policing and shaping, and perform class of service differentiation through VLAN editing. MEF-9 and MEF-14 certified for Ethernet Private Line and Ethernet Virtual Private Line services, the ETX and ETX-A devices ensure five nines (99.999%) service reliability and exact service level agreement (SLA) management. Their automatic fault localization capabilities also help carriers and service providers to reduce operational costs and minimize expensive truck rolls.

Other RAD Ethernet over fiber solutions include Ethernet media converters, which facilitate seamless transport of Ethernet traffic over different media by linking copper cabling with fiber optics and multimode with single mode fiber cables.