Ciena launches Ethernet backhaul equipment for LTE

New products in Ciena's Carrier Ethernet Service Delivery portfolio launched today include two switching products optimized for LTE backhaul and a third device intended for use at business customer locations, Ciena Director of Product Marketing David Parks told Connected Planet.

Carriers deploying Ethernet backhaul networks to support LTE have three key requirements—higher capacity, greater reliability and faster time to market, Parks said.

The new devices support the first requirement by supporting 10 Gb/s uplinks “at a price point necessary to compete in the LTE market,” said Parks.

Greater reliability, he said, relates to the ability of Ciena’s new product line to provide resiliency using the carrier’s choice of a wide range of protocols such as PBB-TE, MPLS-TP and G.8032. The latter, which uses a ring topology, should have strong appeal because of its simplicity, Parks said.

“With MPLS-TP, you provision a [protection] tunnel for every connection,” he said. “With G.8032, I’m protecting the entire network.”

OAM is secret sauce

As for faster time to market, Parks said, “What Ciena has done is we have included a very high degree of software automation in the provisioning and configuration of these devices.” When the product arrives at a cellsite, a basic technician plugs it in and can be up and running quickly with little manual intervention required, said Parks.

Based on real world customer experiences, Ciena said its software automation can save carriers as much as 80% in turn up times in comparison with router-based solutions. Ciena’s equipment also saves about 30% in capex costs in comparison with a routed approach, the company said.

Parks added that the new Ciena line supports a wide range of operations, administration and maintenance (OAM) protocols and a service-aware operating system that enables a wide range of Ethernet service types.

“Some generations of wireless backhaul technology need point-to-point connectivity while others need point-to-multipoint or even multipoint-to-multipoint,” Parks said. In LTE, for example, individual cell towers can talk to one another—a capability that can be enabled through multipoint-to-multipoint interconnection,

Included in the new Ciena portfolio are the ActivEdge 3930 and 3931 service delivery switches intended for use at cellsites and the 3916 service delivery switch intended for installation at business customer locations. The products are commercially available now. Ciena has not yet announced customers for the products but the products have been used in field trials.