Cisco rolls out appliance to enhance carrier Ethernet and IPTV

Cisco this week announced a service provider appliance that the vendor says will help carriers better deliver on the promise of what it calls the "connected life," by bringing fibre connectivity to multi-tenant units like apartments.

As service providers continue to jockey back and forth to differentiate themselves by offering new advanced services, Cisco's service provider senior marketing manager Mike Capuano said the focus is really on the end users, who demand connectivity and the ability to create their own mix of services, whether it's video, voice, IPTV or a combination of many.

"The critical competitive element is to deliver a great customer experience," Capuano said. "End users can create their own service mix if they want to."

The appliance, the ME 3400 24FS, is an update to Cisco's Carrier Ethernet portfolio of its IP Next-Generation Network (IP NGN).

According to Capuano, the ME 3400 24FS delivers fibre to multi-tenant units to enable high-density fibre deployments. He claims that providers can install the box in building basements to ensure in-building reach in a pay-as-you-grow fashion. Port options accommodate fibre and copper and visibility and control over bandwidth.

"Using the ME 3400, providers are able to pinpoint troubleshooting, delay-free access to personalised content and advanced entertainment service delivery unrestrained by distance," Cisco said in a statement.

Along with the appliance, Cisco announced enhancements to its IP NGN Carrier Ethernet Design, including 50 ms resiliency from the core to the premise, increased scalability, new instrumentation for measuring customer service-level agreements (SLAs), and increased resiliency and scalability.

Pinpointing trouble on a massive service provider network has been difficult in the past, according to Eve Guilloches, program manager of telecom infrastructure at IDC. And as the Carrier Ethernet market continues to be a growth area, a better understanding of the network end-to-end has become imperative.

Many vendors are making appliances for the core of the telecom network and moving slowly to the edge, Guilloches said. But the inherent problem with Carrier Ethernet is its need to be more reliable, especially as service providers offer new services like IPTV. The ability to manage the network from end-to-end will help ensure that the network is reliable, she said.

"[With Cisco IP NGN Carrier Ethernet] software can go all the way through fibre directly to the customer to understand what's going on at the customer site," she said. "What you want to do is have as much visibility as possible."

Guilloches said service providers want to know exactly where a problem lies -- whether it's in the satellite feed, the core, or at the customer site. Since data traverses a great deal of network infrastructure, it was difficult in the past for service providers to determine just where the problem lay.

"There are a million ways to screw it up," she said. "Now at least they can diagnose the problem to know where it's falling apart."

Ricky Wong, chairman of Hong Kong Broadcast Network, agreed that troubleshooting was difficult, especially with the mass of traffic and the increased use of new, advanced services.

"With the target to cover two million households for triple-play services on our Carrier Ethernet network, quality of experience is of the utmost importance," Wong said in a statement. "Given the growth of traffic and subscribers, working to ensure it is an ongoing challenge."