Atrica Adds VPLS Traffic Engineering, OC3 Grooming Capabilities

Atrica unveiled major enhancements to its Carrier Ethernet Systems including VPLS-TE capability, enriched service provisioning and management capabilities on its ASPEN network management platform, and an new Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet Demarcation Devices.


The new Virtual Private LAN Service with Traffic Engineering (VPLS-TE) capability adds carrier-class traffic engineering attributes to basic L2 Ethernet-based VPN capabilities, enabling carriers to deliver a L2 VPN traffic engineered service for multi-site any-to-any connectivity. Service providers are able to set and tune any specific bandwidth per each end user site, while utilizing guaranteed, pre-provisioned core bandwidth resources. Atrica features a "bi-directional traffic conditioning" technology.


The company said its bandwidth-conditioned VPLS-TE delivers guaranteed SLAs and hard QoS with sub-50ms service protection and is user-configurable, based on different traffic patterns. The VPLS-TE capability incorporates ingress and egress policing at every point and direction, operator-configurable ingress and egress bandwidth, and operator-configurable core bandwidth. Its broadcast policing capability allows carriers to control broadcast traffic, further optimizing the performance of the network.


In Release 3.5, Atrica also adds a Service Provisioning Planning Tool in its ASPEN management system, enabling carriers to replicate the existing deployed network topology or a new network topology for testing "what if" scenarios.


Atrica is also introducing TDM integration with Circuit Emulation Services over Ethernet with OC-3/STM-1 to DS1/E1 grooming over the Ethernet network. This enhancement enables service providers to connect customer equipment such as PBXs or routers to the metro Ethernet network using multiple T1/E1 connections from multiple sites in the network. It allows them to groom these connections into a single OC-3/STM-1 service handoff at the central office switch or router. The OC-3/STM-1 grooming capability includes advanced protection mechanisms allowing for 50ms protection against any failures in the network. The grooming feature also delivers 1+1 protection of the OC-3/STM-1 equipment by allowing dual redundant OC-3/STM-1 interfaces to be deployed. Atrica said service providers would be able to cost-effectively aggregate TDM and data traffic from multiple subscriber sites into a main POP/CO over a common Ethernet infrastructure.



Atrica is also introducing two Ethernet demarcation devices -- the A-100 Fast Ethernet Demarcation Device and the A-200 Gigabit Ethernet demarcation device. Both support point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, and multipoint-to-multipoint services and support strict SLAs with parameters for including Committed Information Rate (CIR), Excess Information Rate (EIR), priority, delay, and jitter. Pricing is expected to be sub $1,000.
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