One of the biggest stumbling blocks in the evolution of telecommunications has always been the part of the network known as the 'local loop.' This section - the last few miles linking the customer with their nearest exchange - has traditionally been served by copper wires, buried underground or strung overhead.
Designed only to carry simple voice services, these copper wires have until recently acted as a bottleneck to the introduction of the broadband services that the telecommunications industry is staking its future on - a rich menu of video and music content, along with services such as Voice over IP.
Fortunately, thanks to advances in a number of technological areas and a wave of telecommunications liberalisations sweeping the world, we now have an ever-widening range of options when it comes to connecting customers into the wider on-line world.
DSL, for example, continues to improve in speed, performance and geographic reach, sending data signals at wireless frequencies across the existing copper. According to DSL market specialists, Point-Topic, the global number of DSL connections rose by around 60% last year to reach 100 million with penetration continuing to accelerate in many regions. While the broadband speeds available from the different flavours of DSL vary according to the distance that the customer is from their exchange, many consumers now take speeds of 2 Mbps for granted, paying only a few tens of dollars each month for services that would have cost thousands only a few years ago. Indeed, some operators are already busy deploying ADSL2+, a new technology capable of delivering up to 24 Mbps downstream to homes and offices.
On top of this, similar technical advances are driving the ability of wireless local area network (WLAN) technologies to even replace copper in the local loop. Starting life some years ago as a low-cost alternative to cables in campus and business environments, its latest incarnation - known as WiMax - offers the potential of speeds up to 70 Mbps or more at distances of up to 16 km from an exchange, depending on the terrain involved. While wireless in the local loop (WLL) access systems have been tried in the past, they have only been able to deliver quite limited speeds at a low enough cost. It is hoped that WiMax will break this logjam and spur a new wave of innovation amongst telecommunications service providers.
Faster and faster....
While both these systems have major potential in the years ahead, there is another access technology with an enterprise IT past that is also starting to be rolled out by operators in search of giving their customers more bytes for their bucks. Loosely known as Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) or Fast Ethernet, the original Ethernet technology began life nearly two decades ago with the first PCs being connected through local area networks. Standardised under the IEEE, Ethernet can deliver data at a wide range of speeds, from 10 Mbps up to a potential of 100 Gbps on the horizon.
As such, it has been adopted by a number of different communications providers around the world as an ideal technology to support highspeed networks in urban areas, linking businesses and multitenant residential buildings through metropolitan area networks (MANs). In this setting, GigE offers a lower cost, simpler, all-IP alternative to using plain SONET/SDH optical technologies and ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) while keeping the high bandwidths of optical fibre. Alternatively, GigE over fibre can also bring high bandwidths closer to the customer, before transferring to copper cables for the stage in the link within large buildings or over short geographical distances. Activity in the area is being coordinated by the Metro Ethernet Forum.
According to Infonetics Research, nearly $29 bn will be spent worldwide on carrier class, metro Ethernet equipment worldwide between 2004 and 2008, with double digit growth continuing during that period. Asia Pacific currently holds the lead for deployments with around 40% of the market. North America follows closely at 35% and the EMEA region at 21%.
Supporting new services and new revenue streams
So what applications are operators looking at metro Ethernet to deliver? To a certain extent, these vary from region to region, but are already fulfilling real customer demand in different ways. In South Korea, for example, metro Ethernet is used to support the country's massive use of multiplayer games, both through residential connections and through gaming parlours. In Japan, it is often used in business to connect multisite big businesses, while in China and India it is being adopted to deliver broadband communications to blocks of apartments and new housing complexes. In EMEA and North America, its use remains largely limited to enterprise applications, especially those involving the transmission of large amounts of data, such as are found in emergency data back up services.
According to Michael Philpott, senior analyst at Ovum, "Ethernet-based technologies are finally starting to become carrier class, representing a major improvement in cost and efficiency terms against other, more traditional alternatives. That said, there are still a number of issues to be resolved, especially when it comes to delivering guaranteed levels of service quality or in integrating this new infrastructure with existing OAM functions. One additional issue involves the need for systems synchronisation by large corporate IT users who may previously have used the timing data that is central to SDH/SONET and now need to find alternatives. These are however, being resolved and Ethernet offers positive flexibility when it comes to finding different ways to set services up and deliver them through virtual LANs to customers.''
The access network has always been a problematic sort of space for telecommunications service providers. Traditionally, ownership of the local loop was seen as a positive asset, though this has come under attack through the legal requirements for local loop unbundling that have been seen in many countries. Given the huge engineering costs of installing new cables to homes and offices and the problems involved in getting wayleave rights to install those cables, most operators are looking to extract as much value as possible from their existing infrastructure.
Given the demonstrable growing hunger in many parts of the world for true broadband services, new Ethernet technologies in the metropolitan and urban areas give service providers an invaluable new tool in their armouries that they can employ to increase both customer satisfaction and their service revenues.
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