Ikanos intros new chips for IPTV

Ikanos Communications introduced a new line of broadband chip sets today that were designed to deliver IPTV and triple-play services.

Like the previous generation, the new fifth-generation VDSL2 chipsets (the Fx100100-5 and Fx10050-5 for central offices and remote terminals and the Fx100100S-5 and Fx10050S-5 for customer premises) are multimodal, allowing equipment manufacturers and carriers to carry VDSL2, VDSL1, ADSL, ADSL2 and ADSL2+ on the same line card.

The new chipsets--meant for DSLAMs, optical network units, concentrators and customer premises gear--support 48 ports per line card of symmetrical, 100-Mb/s bandwidth and boast a longer reach than the previous generation of Ikanos chips. Whereas the fourth generation had a range of about 15,000 feet, the new chips have a range of 18,000 feet. When deployed at the same distance, the new chips will offer better performance than their predecessors, allowing carriers to serve more customers, the company said.

The new chips also include new features to help manage triple-play services. Unlike previous Ikanos chips, the new set can classify packets in order to discriminate against different services, protecting the quality of, say, video at the expense of best-effort services like Internet access. Piyush Sevalia, Ikanos’ product marketing director, claims the new chips boast a high quality of service because they classify packets on the chip at Layer 1, the physical layer, as opposed to the higher layers employed by switches and routers, which may delay packets in the classification process.

Layer 1 packet classification also allows another feature, Sevalia said: “dynamic rate repartitioning.” DRR adjusts bandwidth when users deactivate a given service, reallocating bandwidth to other live services. Previous Ikanos chipsets could only perform DRR with some services, but the new generation can apply it to the entire triple-play.

Ikanos also improved the impulse noise protection on the new generation of chipsets by adding memory and erasure detection decoding.

Vendors are sampling the new chips now, which Ikanos said will be “in full production” by the end of September. Equipment built around the new chips could be introduced to carrier labs before the end of the year, Sevalia said.