Alcatel-Lucent carves out managed broadband offerings

Alcatel-Lucent today announced an update to its triple-play platform designed to add higher service quality options to best-effort broadband.

Coupling higher bandwidth capacity with more granular subscriber management tools, the vendor is offering carriers the possibility of new managed services for content owners as well as discerning broadband users.

“The new architecture enhancements now enable consumers and business partners to choose the quality of experience they want, for the content they care about and at a price they are prepared to pay,” Alcatel-Lucent said in a prepared statement.

The upgrades would allow carriers to offer higher tiers of high-speed Internet access to end users so that -- for example, gamers or regular consumers of high-quality Internet video -- can pay more if they want more than best-effort Internet access. It also allows carriers to offer service quality assurances to over-the-top content providers. And it is designed to be flexible enough to let carriers tailor those options for specific customers and users.

“The resolution of your offering can be refined to a specific application or specific content and be targeted to specific subscribers,” said Jim Guillet, assistant vice president of triple-play product marketing for Alcatel-Lucent. “There’s a lot of control mechanism to define customized packages. It could be [applied to] just ABC.com or a specific program within ABC.com.”

Two new adaptor modules -- the Application Assurance-Integrated Services Adaptor (AA-ISA) and the High-Scale Media Dependent Adaptor (HS-MDA) -- give the vendor’s triple-play platform the subscriber management muscle to do the job. The AA-ISA allows carriers to administer QoS policies on a per-application and per-subscriber basis. And the HS-MDA increases the number of queues the platform can manage from 1 million per rack to 19 million.

To help meet these increased quality-of-service requirements, Alcatel-Lucent is also adding a new line card that replaces the existing 40-Gb/s slot with 100 Gb/s, more than doubling the capacity of its services router to 1200 gigabit Ethernet interfaces (or 150 10-GigE ports) per rack. Put another way, Alcatel says the new IOM3-XP line card increases the capacity of its router chassis from 400 Gb/s to 1 terabit per second.

Finally, an update to the system’s software now gives it support for PPPoE (the point-to-point-over Ethernet protocol), allowing carriers to migrate legacy systems to next-generation architectures at their own pace and cap investment in legacy broadband remote access servers.

“The value proposition under all this is that the bandwidth is managed, it can be configured with very stringent QoS policies, which each part of the network helps enforce and deliver end-to-end,” Guillet said.