eircom Installs Portal Software for Billing of Broadband

eircom, Ireland's incumbent provider of fixed telecommunications, has implemented Portal's convergent billing platform to support its broadband services. Portal's billing solution supports both existing ISP services as well as for the rapid deployment of residential DSL. The billing platform is implemented on Sun Solaris hardware by Portal business partner KPMG. It will be managed from eircom's ISP Network Operations Centre in Dublin. Financial terms were not disclosed. http://www.portal....

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Alcatel Upgrades its 1660 Optical Multi-Service Node for 10 Gbps

Alcatel announced several enhancements for its 1660 SM optical transport and packet switching platform, including a 10 Gbps upgrade and new coarse DWDM capabilities. Alcatel said its upgraded 1660 SM provides optimized transport and integrated networking functions for data applications, including Metro Ethernet and storage area networks (SAN). The Alcatel 1660 SM is an add-drop multiplexer and small cross connect. The platform uses Integrated Service Adapter (ISA) plug-in modules to perform rate-adaptive Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet transport,...

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Summary of NGN Ventures Conference

At the closing of this week's NGN Ventures Conference in Burlingame, California, Co-Chairmen Dr. John McQuillan and David Passmore summarized some of the most notable themes of the event. McQuillan also announced that this was his last year as co-chairman of NGN Ventures.In Last Mile networks, there are many different technical solutions. All are likely to succeed in some way, but each in specific environments. Last mile networks and systems are gearing up to deal with multimedia deliver, and regulatory uncertainty will continue to influence...

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NGN Ventures: What's Next for Ethernet

An opportunity remains for Ethernet in carrier networks because the demand for bandwidth continues and bottlenecks remain in access networks, said Anand Parikh, VP of Business Development for Appian Communications. However, while Ethernet is suitable as a transport method for shared, and best-effort Internet services, it is still not ready to be the transport layer for multiservice TDM and packet traffic. Parikh observed that to do so would require significant and expensive MPLS upgrades throughout core the network before Ethernet could really...

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NGN Ventures: Next-Generation Voice

IP telephony services are not really about cheaper communications but about integrated applications, said Jerry Cady, CEO of Pingtone Communications, speaking at last week's NGN Ventures conference in Burlingame, California. Whereas traditional voice service providers were essentially transport providers and termination providers, the new generation of integrated communications providers are essentially "application providers." By this he means that the new service provider is unbound from the physical, switching network. Traditional carriers...

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NGN Ventures: Rethinking the Internet Traffic Model - Beyond TCP/IP

The bubble era's brute force solutions of bandwidth and people does not scale and cannot work any longer, said Doug Brent, CEO of Packet Design, at the NGN Ventures conference. A smarter system is needed, and Packet Design believes that route analytics based on control plane analysis can provide it. Network layer analysis today is highly limited. Route analytics provides up to date information accuracy, root cause analysis, and scalability to support large networks. It offers a forensically accurate view of a network, enabling the diagnosis...

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NGN Ventures: Emerging Wireless Alternatives, The Broadband Frontier

"I'm a big fan of WLAN," said Ray Dolan, Chairman & CEO of Flarion Technologies. 802.11 is already the WLAN winner and it will be wildly successful for many years. The problem is the wireless WAN. "Users hate 3G and 2.5G" because the experience is all wrong. What people really want is ubiquity between wireless LANs and WANs. They want seamless IP access to existing applications and devices that they already like using, such as laptops, PDAs, digital cameras, and consumer entertainment electronics. Flarion is creating an alternative to...

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