Sunday, April 24, 2005

Alcatel Tunes its Core and Edge Routers for Triple Play

Alcatel announced new features on its 7450 Ethernet Service Switch and 7750 Service Router aimed at triple play and business VPN services.


Enhancements to the Alcatel 7450 include scalable, highly efficient multicasting for IPTV distribution and automated per-subscriber security policies. In a telco triple play architecture, the Alcatel 7450 would sit at the edge of a metro network accepting a large number of video feeds from a core IP/MPLS network and then multicasting the most watched channels via Gigabit Ethernet links to DSLAMs or ONTs further out in the field. The Alcatel 7450 has also gained the ability to provide DHCP for triple play services. This DHCP capability automatically allocates IP addresses to multimedia appliances or hosts in network (set-top boxes / VOIP Phones). With this process, Alcatel is also providing automatically configured security filters to protect the network against Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and prevent unauthorized user access in the network.


With triple play services, customers will soon demand high-levels of network availability for their premium TV choices. To meet this challenge, Alcatel offers its non-stop routing technology. Non-stop routing provides a statefull hot-back-up. Should routing problems arise, the system recovers the control plane without routing neighbors ever knowing there was a problem. Using this approach, Alcatel said it is able to ensure that entertainment and VoIP services are for "Always On" and that E911 services are unaffected by network outages.


BT Exact, the research, technology and IT operations business of BT, has tested the high availability features of the 7750 SR. Details of this report are now available from Alcatel.


Other new features on the Alcatel 7750 Service Router enable it to deliver scalable Layer 2 and Layer 3 services, including Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), IP VPNs, high-speed Internet, ATM, and Frame Relay. The latest release also delivers new Ethernet, TDM and ATM interfaces.
http://www.alcatel.com

  • In October 2004, SBC announced the selection of Alcatel for the delivery of triple play services to 18 million homes in the U.S., as part of its Project Lightspeed.