Posts Tagged ‘Performance Assurance’

SureWest Communications Integrates Accedian Networks’ MetroNID® Performance Assurance Platform in its Wireless Carrier Backhaul Service

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
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Integrated service monitoring and performance management lets SureWest meet the needs of wireless operators with high quality backhaul services.

June 23, 2010, Light Reading Mobile Strategy Conference New York – Accedian Networks, the market-leading developer of Carrier Ethernet Performance Assurance Network Interface Devices (NIDs) and service management solutions, today announced that SureWest Communications (NASDAQ: SURW) is deploying Accedian Network’s Performance Assurance Platform to ensure high quality service delivery for its Wireless Carrier Backhaul Ethernet-based mobile backhaul service.

SureWest conducted an extensive evaluation of performance monitoring solutions before selecting the Accedian MetroNID® for integration into the network. “The Accedian solution provided us the best performance assurance system to meet our customers’ needs,” said Ken Johnson, SureWest’s Vice President and General Manager of Operations. “We chose a solution that enables us to deliver the highest quality mobile backhaul services to our wireless operator customers. But we also selected one that we can seamlessly integrate across our entire Carrier Ethernet service portfolio, and the Accedian Performance Assurance Platform gives us that flexibility.”

The explosive growth of smart phones and mobile broadband devices, coupled with the deployment of next generation mobile broadband applications, is creating a demand for bandwidth that simply cannot be met using the legacy mobile backhaul networks. Existing wireless backhaul networks originally designed for voice have a typical capacity of 1-3 Megabits per cell site and do not accommodate the onslaught of broadband data traffic, where mobile operators are seeing demand for 10-50 Megabits per cell site. SureWest’s fiber- and Ethernet-based networks in both the greater Sacramento and Kansas City regions are more than sufficient to meet this demand.

SureWest’s Wireless Carrier Backhaul is an Ethernet-based service that provides the capacity and performance needed for wireless operators to effectively deliver mobile broadband services. Delivering Ethernet mobile backhaul services can be challenging as the mobile network demands precise service quality. Monitoring latency, packet delay variation, packet loss and availability of mobile backhaul services is critical to successfully meeting the wireless operators’ needs and requires robust performance assurance to ensure that the mobile backhaul network meets these needs around the clock.

Before deploying the MetroNID®s in its network, SureWest compared them against a number of alternatives. The decision criteria included not only performance assurance monitoring and reporting features, but SureWest also compared performance, interface density and power consumption. All aspects for deploying the most efficient service performance infrastructure were evaluated. “Accedian is proud to be working with such a recognized innovator,” said Craig Easley, Accedian’s VP of Marketing. “We were confident that our MetroNID® solution would meet the demanding set of requirements that SureWest’s wireless operator customers demanded and welcome the opportunity to continue adding value to SureWest’s Wireless Carrier Backhaul service.”

Accedian will be speaking at the Light Reading Mobile Backhaul Live event in New York City this June 23rd. Event information: Accedian.com/events. A white paper version of this case study is available by visiting www.Accedian.com.


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May EtherNEWS – MEF Backhaul, OAM & ENNI Training Class

Monday, May 3rd, 2010
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This Month’s Issue

This month we feature an in-depth training session for mobile backhaul operators. Recorded at CTIA 2010, this 40 minute tutorial provides a detailed introduction to the MEF 22 standard for wireless backhaul, MEF 26 UNI Type II ENNI, and Ethernet OAM requirements for successful 3G & 4G backhaul implementations.

Catch up with the latest standards: taught by MEF Board member Craig Easley, founder of the Carrier Ethernet Academy.

The EtherNEWS Community:

We publish our online newsletter in an interactive blog format so you can discuss each issue with other telecom professionals. Get notified when EtherNEWS is updated by subscribing to our RSS feed or Twitter feeds, or join our fans at Accedian.com/Facebook.

We hope you enjoy the newsletter and other selected technology and insight articles on our blog, updated several times each week.

Application Highlights

Watch the full 40 minute training session in the first video player. The second video, below, features the Q&A session following the training, as moderated by Dan Meyer, Editor of RCR Wireless News.

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The feature application video in this EtherNEWS edition is also available as a free Video Podcast. Download Now.
MetroNODE 10GE™ Packet Performance Node

The MetroNODE 10GE™ rests firmly on the engineering foundation of Accedian Networks’ award-winning EtherNID® & MetroNID® units, deployed since 2005 by hundreds of service providers worldwide. Our development team replicated the core, pipelined Fast-Thru™ all-hardware architecture from our gigabit Ethernet platforms to provide a truly amazing 10 Gig packet performance node with a proven feature set carriers have come to rely on.

Like all our units, the 10GE offers near-zero pass through latency and jitter, making it ideal for performance-critical 10 Gig hand-offs and SLA monitoring applications.

10GE

Learn all about the MetroNODE 10GE with our quick intro video:

Overview Video

For more information about Accedian Networks solutions, please visit our document library on Accedian.com.

Latest News

Featuring a hardware-based, ultra-low latency architecture, the 10GE delivers highly-scalable performance monitoring for critical 10 gigabit Ethernet applications. Addressing a critical need in 3G & 4G (LTE & WiMAX) backhaul networks, the 10GE can establish and maintain thousands of Y.1731 sessions at the Mobile Switching Center (MSC), providing comprehensive Ethernet Operations, Administration & Maintenance (OAM) coverage unachievable using today’s switches or routers.
Learn more.

18-19 May, Amsterdam
Visit Accedian Networks at stand 56 at the LTE World Summit in Amsterdam and see our full range of Ethernet packet assurance solutions including the new MetroNODE 10GE unit, capable of monitoring 1000s of Y.1731 sessions at the MSC. Accedian Networks will also be on the panel of the “Industry Debate: The Future of Backhaul is Fixed, Discuss…” session.
More Info.

23 June, New York
Accedian Networks will be speaking and exhibiting at Light Readings’s Backhaul Strategies Conference. Learn about our Ethernet solutions for 3G & 4G wireless backhaul networks. Join us in discussing emerging issues in the “Overcoming the Scale Challenge in Packet Backhaul Evolution” session.
More info.

Visit our events calendar on Accedian.com to learn where we’ll be exhibiting and participating in conferences in 2010. We’re going global with our events team, so we’re likely to be near you this spring or summer.


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LTE: Cleaning Up the Cell Site

Thursday, March 18th, 2010
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I’ve winced every time I’ve heard the time “convergence” over the past several years.  Convergence has always been a marketing word for “mess”, where multiple technologies co-exist and intermingle in ways that increase Tylenol consumption and slow down true telecom innovation.

Today’s wireless networks, including the current 3G deployments, still rely on this dirty word with “converged” cell site connections – duplicating provisioning of both TDM private lines for voice, timing and signaling and Ethernet for data.

There are many good reasons why.  Until recently, Ethernet hasn’t proven as reliable as required to carry conversations, and T1s are already in place at cell sites where sync is required to keep radios locked on a common frequency and phase for roaming hand-offs.  Necessary for now, but inefficient (and despised?) all the same.

LTE offers a chance to do some spring cleaning at the cell site, simplifying backhaul connectivity with a single, performance-assured Carrier Ethernet link.  Simplicity looks like it’s making its way back into telecom, right?

Cell Site Evolution

Unfortunately, we may be gaining capacity and working with less equipment, but the clutter has simply moved from physical equipment to the way it’s configured.  No one ever had their Mom tell them “clean up your virtual room”, but this is where the mess goes in LTE backhaul networks – into the provisioning, monitoring and performance assurance required to compensate for having all your data running through a single pipe.

Making a clean break to a fully packet-based architecture, voice calls will be VoIP, carried over the same all-IP infrastructure carrying the latest generation of multicast and on-demand web-based video, Internet, messaging and email traffic.  With each vying for available bandwidth, maintaining per-application Quality of Service (QoS) is critical – the best-effort, limited-bandwidth backhaul connections serving legacy data services will not suffice.

4G services require ultra-low latency, jitter, and packet loss with assured throughput and availability.  Latency can spell the end of conversations if signaling delays interrupt session continuity when roaming between cells.  Jitter and packet loss can make audio inaudible and video unwatchable.  Insufficient backhaul bandwidth leads to congestion, increasing latency, packet loss and packet retransmission resulting in degraded QoS.  Availability is the most basic of all –  if the network goes down, so do your customers – outages and lack of bandwidth are the primary drivers for customer churn.

So while Ethernet to the cell site is certainly the future (and looks clean from the perspective of slick, stylized network diagrams), it doesn’t come without its own baggage.  Best to be prepared for the surprises that are popping up in field trials – keep an eye on QoS, monitor it proactively or you may just discover the monsters in the closet.

CTIA next week will be a good place to explore these trends – check out the backhaul pavilion, get trained and attend the talks going on to learn all about what we’re facing.


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