Feb 23, 2011 1:41 PM,

NSN/ Juniper joint venture launches new Ethernet access switches

By Joan Engebretson

Devices include timing, circuit emulation and management capabilities targeted to meet needs of mobile backhaul networks

Two new Ethernet access switches, announced yesterday from Carrier Ethernet Solutions, aim to provide Sonet-like control capability to mobile backhaul networks, Juniper Networks Senior Vice President Rami Rahim told Connected Planet. Carrier Ethernet Solutions is a joint venture of Juniper and Nokia Siemens Networks focused on networking equipment for mobile backhaul.

More on this Topic

Industry News

Blogs

Briefing Room

“In the past and to a large part today, the technology used in this network was legacy Sonet and SDH,” said Rahim. “Carriers are realizing they need to move away from it because it is not as cost effective as a packet based approach. What’s unique about our solution is that it’s a packet-based solution that offers a similar operational model to what was used with Sonet and SDH.”

The part of a carrier’s organization that is responsible for Ethernet backhaul networks is a “transport-minded operating unit,” Rahim said. “Those groups don’t want to give up on end-to-end centralized management and provisioning and they don’t want to configure services using command line interfaces on routers. They also want 50 millisecond end-to-end [service restoration] and this is what we are offering.”

Unique backhaul requirements
The new devices would typically be installed on access rings operating at 1, 2 or 10 Gb/s, said Nokia Siemens Networks Senior Director of Technical Marketing Chris McCallan.

Wholesale backhaul providers will be key users of the new products, McCallan said. “Any wholesale provider has to provide service level agreement statistics to its service provider customers,” said McCallan. “In that scenario, at the base station transceiver sites, each wholesale service provider has to place its own box, regardless of the fact that the base station may support the same functionality. The base station is not under control of the wholesale provider.”

The new devices also support circuit emulation, enabling them to support existing TDM connectivity requirements, as well as Synch-E timing, a critical requirement for LTE networks, McCallan said.