(Accedian Networks') EtherNEWS Blog

Widely deployed in 3G & 4G wireless networks, solutions address base station equipment limitations.

Montreal, Canada; February 3rd, 2010 – Accedian Networks ™, the leading provider of Packet Performance Assurance ™ solutions for telecom, cable and wireless communications providers, announced today record demand for EtherNID® and MetroNID® packet assurance demarcation units destined for cell-site deployment in 3G & 4G (WiMAX, LTE) wireless networks. In many cases operators rely on the units to overcome the technical shortcomings of base station networking equipment – in addition to using the advanced service assurance and networking functions the devices provide.

Current base stations excel in radio transmission, data encoding, encryption and session management, but often lack the sophisticated performance monitoring and Ethernet operations, administration and maintenance (OAM) functionality required to maintain quality of service (QoS) and reliability. As 3G & 4G technology moves from the lab to large-scale networks, managing backhaul network performance becomes central to successful service deployment.

Cox Business is one of the leading Ethernet providers in the U.S. and wireless backhaul for the company’s carrier customers is one of the fastest growing applications for the networking technology.

“Performance monitoring and Ethernet OAM is required between every cell site and the mobile switching center,” said Jay Clark, Director of Carrier Product and Sales Operations for Cox Business. “This involves maintaining QoS for multiple flows, something NIDs do very well. Ideally we’ll see hardware-based NID features integrated into the base stations and Ethernet transport elements of the future.”

Accedian’s compact, cost-efficient EtherNID & MetroNID units provide Ethernet & IP monitoring, maintenance and troubleshooting features designed into a dedicated silicon processor that provides the processing power required for these demanding tasks. While many base stations offer a handful of OAM and monitoring features, software implementation limits accuracy and scalability, making these functions unreliable or unusable in large-scale, real-world deployments.

FiberTower’s Vijay Lewis, Chief Network Architect of America’s first multi-mobile operator backhaul provider, explains their experience, “With multiple service classes carrying a combination of real-time communication, mobile video, internet and email traffic, FiberTower’s Ethernet wireless backhaul network needs continuous, precise performance monitoring to maintain acceptable quality of experience for subscribers. Latency, jitter, packet loss and throughput need to be assured, and the service needs excellent availability. The Accedian EtherNID unit provides this end-to-end visibility non-intrusively and very precisely – the result of careful engineering that can’t be replicated by simple software-based features sometimes included as afterthoughts in switches, routers and our customer’s base stations.”

Fibertech Networks, also providing backhaul to leading mobile operators, agree. “When you couple today’s network architecture with the capabilities of an EtherNID, you have everything you need, all the OAM functionality – 802.1ag, Y.1731 – plus loopback testing and stats reported in real-time,” explained Tom Perrone, Director of Engineering & Network Planning Manager at Fibertech Networks, adding “We also book-end at the mobile switching center (MSC) with a MetroNID that allows us to monitor end-to-end so we can predict, trend and troubleshoot the network at anytime.”

Accedian solutions will be on display at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Feb 15-18, booth 2B122, as well as at CEBIT (Germany), COMPTEL Spring (Nashville),CTIA (Las Vegas) – see our events calendar at www.Accedian.com for details or to arrange a meeting at these events.