Deployment of the upgrade currently is underway, and Telenor expects to have its 500,000 DSL lines migrated to the new VDSL2 platform by 2015, according to a recent case study, Telenor Achieves Competitive Advantage In Ultra-Broadband, on the rollout.
To efficiently deliver ultra-broadband services, however, Telenor needed a way to determine which of its existing DSL lines could be upgraded to VDSL2 without issue, and which ones needed additional infrastructure changes. Further, according to the case study, the company wanted to be able to provide DSL subscribers with the realistic attainable speed they could expect to receive if they upgraded to VDSL2.
Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Network Analyzer – Copper has helped Telenor meet those goals.
The Motive Network Analyzer integrates line testing, diagnosis and optimization, helping operators ensure that DSL lines meet quality and stability requirements to successfully deploy high-speed Internet and triple play services.
One of its features is its Upgrade Predictor, which allows the operator to see how well the technology will work on existing infrastructure, and where improvements might be needed. Upgrade Predictor takes snapshot views of each individual DSL line based on values obtained from customer premises equipment (CPE) and the DSL access multiplexer (DSLAM) over a period of weeks. Telenor then could predict what needed to be upgraded and when.
The solution also offers dynamic line management, ensuring the best profile is assigned to the line in combination with its service. Using a real-time and per-line approach, DLM automatically monitors the condition of each of the lines in the network, and uses a variety of factors to optimize speed and preserve stability.
“Before Upgrade Predictor, we used tables that showed the line length from the DSLAM to the customer premises to determine if the customer line was
a good candidate for upgrade,” noted Foyn Johannessen in the case study, director of telephony & broadband at Telenor Norway.
“A the end of the day, the Motive Network Analyzer, together with our total upgrade of infrastructure, has given us a real competitive advantage,” Johannessen said. “We can offer ultra-broadband to more subscribers, know that it’s going to work, and that the customer experience will be excellent. This helps us to reduce churn and really compete and win in the marketplace.”]]>There was a time when fiber-to the-home was seen as the future of broadband. But all that changed with the introduction of VDSL2 Vectoring.
“With a single innovation, the market shifted,” noted Alcatel-Lucent colleagues Paul Spruyt and Dr. Stefaan Vanhastel in a recent blog post, The Numbers are in: Vectoring 2.0 Makes G.fast Faster. “Copper became a valuable commodity again as operators began using their copper assets to deliver fast broadband speeds faster.”
Making that copper even more valuable potentially is the new G.fast standard.
G.fast can increase aggregate bit rates over copper loops shorter than 250 m to fiber speeds of more than 1 Gb/s, the authors explained. It also delivers a cost advantage over deploying fiber directly to the home.
The trouble is that G.fast suffers from crosstalk even more than VDSL2. Tests by Bell Labs on older, unshielded cables in Austria showed that G.fast reached speeds of 500 Mb/s over 100 m when a single line was active, but they fell to a measly 60 MB/s when crosstalk was introduced as a result of a second G.fast line being added.
Traditional vectoring will not solve the problem. As the authors highlighted, “Through research at Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent identified a number of factors that increase the complexity of vectoring with G.fast.”
This prompted Alcatel-Lucent to develop what it calls “vectoring 2.0,” which does enable G.fast to leverage vectoring to reduce the effects of crosstalk. In fact, using vectoring 2.0, Bell Labs was able to reach aggregate speeds of 1.1 Gb/s over a single pair of 70 m lines and 800 Mb/s over a single pair of 100 m lines.
The result is operators now have a number of options to choose from depending on the scenarios.
Source: Alcatel-Lucent
“While G.fast is not yet standardized and won’t be commercially available for several years, it is a natural evolution of VDSL2,” surmised the blog post. “In the meantime, operators can rely on VDSL2 vectoring to serve their customers in a cost-effective way.”
Delivering high-quality, high-bandwidth business service connectivity at an economical price point is critical for today's service providers, who are being challenged by unremitting competition and ever-increasing subscriber traffic growth.
With this in mind, many forward-thinking operators have turned to Digital Subscriber Link (DSL) and Gigabit Passive Optical Networks (GPON) as access technologies for mobile backhaul (MBH) and business service delivery. These networks have been proven to provide high reliability and availability at a cost-effective price point using IP/MPLS backhaul.
The leading equipment provider in this space is Alcatel-Lucent, whose 7705 Services Aggregation Router (SAR) family provides an integrated set of DSL and GPON backhaul capabilities that can help service providers quickly and efficiently accommodate for business traffic growth. The portfolio enables operators to leverage their existing broadband access infrastructure, whether it be microwave, copper or fiber-based.
Operators can utilize the capabilities provided by Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) products to complement leased lines with DSL connections, or replace them completely using either DSL or GPON. The end result is the enablement of a high-performance network capable of addressing the increasing demand for broadband services, and without the need for a costly tear-down of existing infrastructure. The ALU mobile backhaul portfolio not only minimizes capital expenditures and operating expenses; it also provides unique avenues for innovative, revenue generating, value-added services.
The 7705 Services Aggregation Router family, "allows the promotion of business services and mobile backhaul transport via broadband access from a niche capability to a long-term, highly viable infrastructure for backhaul," says Alcatel-Lucent.
Alcatel-Lucent’s success in the space has been well documented. The company was recently recognized as the leading global vendor in the Ethernet cell site gateway and Ethernet mobile backhaul router market for the first six months of 2011.
Looking to build on that success, ALU recently added to the family by unveiling new power-efficient, small footprint, high-performance 7705 SAR-M models, which ALU says provide additional network flexibility by supporting a variety of cell site access options.
"Alcatel-Lucent’s leadership in the mobile backhaul market combined with our deep understanding of networks operating in very different environments means that we can help operators evolve their offer to enter the mobile internet era and satisfy all their customers’ requirements," Philippe Keryer, President of the Networks Group at Alcatel-Lucent, noted back in October.
"The 7705 SAR-M forms part of our end-to-end mobile backhaul solution and complements our ground-breaking new lightRadio product family in supporting the swift delivery of the internet on the move, with the highest quality," he added.
Alcatel-Lucent says that there are two main scenarios where 7705 SAR-M can be employed with GPON or DSL infrastructure: the hybrid off-load scenario and the pure backhaul scenario.
Hybrid Off-Load Scenario
In the hybrid off-load scenario, service providers can continue to transmit voice and other mission-critical traffic over leased line infrastructure. Data traffic, meanwhile, will be moved to the more cost-effective DSL network. Or, operators can save even more money by migrating both data and voice and signaling traffic away from leased lines using the DSL combination module in the 7705 SAR-M. Essentially, the hybrid model keeps both options available.
Pure Backhaul Scenario
The pure backhaul option is the most cost-effective scenario. With this model, DSL or GPON network access links are used to aggregate all traffic to a DSLAM or OLT, thus enabling service providers to completely decommission their leased lines. In either scenario, service providers can turbo-charge their networks while trimming their budgets.
With backhaul representing a substantial portion of the total cost of mobile networks, finding the right solution that is both cost-effective and provides increased performance has never been more critical.To meet these challenges, service providers must have the right tools and processes to meet the expectations of customers on DSL networks, while also preventing the escalation of operational expenses (OPEX) in doing so even as migrations to all fiber connections are taking place.
This fall Alcatel-Lucent announced that its Motive Network Analyzer surpassed the 100 customer mark. The big draw for this solution is its ability to enable service providers to identify, diagnose and troubleshoot all DSL problems across fiber and copper that can affect the customers’ experience when leveraging broadband service.
The Motive Network Analyzer offers a Dynamic Line Management (DLM) module to guarantee the optimal experience for high-bandwidth services over DSL, and remotely manages networks with fiber access to improve customer satisfaction at a fraction of the cost. It also offers a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) that creates a list of possible causes when a line defect occurs. And, it provides assistance to the customer support team to speed problem resolution.
Alcatel-Lucent’s focus on CXT is extensive. The company is committed to providing the necessary tools such as its Motive Network Analyzer products as they optimize copper and fiber loops to the maximum bit rate and stability possible with its Dynamic Line Management. This ensures the DSL networks are stable at all times, even when lines are upgraded or when services requiring higher bandwidths are deployed. It means mitigation of the risks that customers will have less than quality experiences even if the last mile of their loops are cooper.
The Motive Network Analyzer reduces operational expenses through:
It also importantly helps to eliminate the limited visibility service providers have into their fiber access infrastructure to optimize performance for all subscribers.
As noted in the announcement of the passing of the customer milestone, Ben Geller, Senior Director, Solutions Marketing at Alcatel-Lucent stated:
“Today, we are celebrating an important milestone with our Network Analyzer product. Having more than 100 customers around the world clearly shows the value it brings to service providers…A key element of our Customer Experience Transformation (CXT) solution portfolio, it helps service providers focus on a customer-first strategy, fostering brand loyalty and enabling them to establish a superior relationship with their subscribers.”
Alcatel-Lucent provides two flavors of the analyzer: the Network Analyzer-Copper and the 5530 Network Analyzer-Fiber.
The Network Analyzer-Copper: Provides integrated line testing, diagnosis and optimization, enabling service providers to meet quality and stability requirements with their DSL lines, while also providing greater visibility into DSL loop quality to ensure problems are avoided, anticipated and quickly resolved.
The 5530 Network Analyzer – Fiber: Is the first of its kind of technology to drive the maximum reliability within the fiber access network. This optical remote management product provides the service provider with the necessary tools to proactively detect fiber equipment degradations and failures, while also enabling enhanced troubleshooting capabilities.
Quality of experience (QoE) is becoming a critical differentiator between services and service providers. This means that having tools that give visibility into loop performance and enable manageability of the last mile to assure experiences are best-performing and can be readily spotted and fixed if they are not, is in many ways becoming indispensible. ]]>