ECI Telecom Launches New Approach in Broadband Delivery for Fibre Networks - the BroadGate SDH access systems - Product Announcement

Cambridge Telcom Report, Sept 27, 1999

ECI Telecom Wednesday launched a new family of SDH access solutions at IBC's SDH Forum in London. These products are designed to allow network operators to rollout a full range of narrow, wide, and broadband services (including IP, Video, Voice and ATM) over their existing fibre networks, without the complexity of adapting telephony and other synchronous services to packet or cell-based technologies to multiplex these services onto a single link.

New Services Delivered

The BroadGate family partitions the capacity of typical fibre access networks to enable the delivery of data, voice, and video services directly to the subscribers' premises. The BroadGate systems will work with any standard SDH network.

"Operators typically make significant investments to develop a flexible fibre infrastructure. BroadGate allows operators to harness their investment and to deliver services directly to their subscribers without deploying new technology, redeveloping back-office systems or retraining staff," explains Eran Dariel, VP Marketing for ECI Telecom's Network Systems business unit. "BroadGate is a simple, low-cost way of delivering a complete range of services by leveraging the proven SDH technology with which our customers are already familiar. BroadGate provides broadband service delivery for a fibre-access world."

Keeping Services In Their Native Form

When network operators already own fibre to their subscribers' premises, or when they lease dark-fibre access, they typically have far more bandwidth available than what their subscribers need. "ATM is a powerful but complex technology," says Eran Dariel. "If you have fibre between the customer and the Point Of Presence, you have plenty of bandwidth, so there is no need to invest in ATM for access. However, BroadGate allows service providers to extend their existing SDH networks to their customers' sites delivering telephony, data, IP, ATM and LAN services over their existing and proven SDH networks."

Low-Risk Deployment of Broadband Services

"This ability to extend existing SDH networks, removes the risks involved in developing new network infrastructures to deploy new services," comments Hezi Lapid, ECI Telecom's Corporate Vice President and General Manager for the Network Systems business unit. "For some of our customers this is a much cheaper and faster way to deploy new broadband services, alongside existing frame relay, IP, LAN, and ATM services. BroadGate offers an integrated, efficient, and manageable approach to service delivery for companies who own their fibre infrastructure," he concludes.

Logical Extension to SDH Access Architectures

ECI Telecom has become a specialist in the deployment of SDH solutions in the access network. Its range of small SDH add-drop-multiplexers (ADMs) is deployed in street-cabinet environments around the globe.

BroadGate provides a logical extension to this capability by extending the fibre interface from the street cabinet to the subscriber's premises. This fibre-to-the-subscriber model can significantly reduce an operator's cost of deployment, and allow them to capitalise on their installed plant and in-house experience.

Models for Every Service

The BroadGate family currently includes three models of Network Termination Points. These Network Termination Points are located at the subscriber premises and provide an interface to the required services of each subscriber. Each system supports a 155Mbps STM-1 connection to the wide area network and offers a range of subscriber connections over which the network operator's services are presented to the customer.

Desktop or wall mounted versions of all the NTE systems are offered. They are all fully managed via SNMP, and each have a footprint smaller than a sheet of A4 paper and cost between $1500 and $3000.

ECI Telecom Ltd. is a provider of integrated network solutions for digital communications and data transmission systems. The Company designs, develops, manufactures, markets and supports end-to-end digital telecommunications solutions for today's new services and converging networks. The Company's products create bandwidth, maximize revenues for network operators, expand capacity, improve performance and enable new revenue-producing services. In doing so, they enhance the capabilities of existing networks to support voice, data, video and multimedia services. ECI Telecom's equipment supports traffic in more than 500 service networks in over 145 countries. FMI: http://www.ecitele.com.