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COMTEST introduces TEJAS expert |
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Comtest's Gary Casper with Dr Kumar Sivarajan of Tejas Networks
Local telecommunication companies now have access to the Tejas Networks range of carrier grade communications infrastructure equipment through southern African distributor Comtest. Comtest recently played host to Dr Kumar Sivarajan, the Chief Technology Officer of Tejas Networks. Dr Kumar used his visit to South Africa to meet leading telecommunications companies such as Vodacom, MTN and Neotel, where he discussed advances in optical transport networks for packet services.
According to Dr Kumar, “The world’s optical fiber transmission networks are built to the Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) and Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) standards. The first generation of SDH/SONET was developed in the 1990’s and quickly became the mainstay of optical transport in service provider networks all over the world due to its high reliability and detailed fault isolation capabilities.”
However, this generation of SDH was designed mainly to cater to voice traffic that was predominant at that time. Dr Kumar continues: “The next generation of SDH systems was standardized in 2002—03 and focused on efficient transport of data/Ethernet services over first- and second-generation SDH/SONET networks using techniques such as virtual concatenation (VCAT), Generic Framing Procedure (GFP) and Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS). These standards ensured that the investments made by service providers in their SDH infrastructures were fully protected.”
Today, most service providers need to provide other data services including Ethernet LAN services (ELAN) and also support triple-play networks with IPTV. Supporting separate networks for data and voice/TDM services, especially in the access, is a costly proposition both in terms of capital expenditure as well as operational expenses. Hence, most service providers will deploy a converged transport network that is capable of supporting all applications including switched data services (IPTV, ELAN, MPLS), Ethernet and other private lines, internet access including aggregation of DSLAM traffic, as well as transport of E1s/T1s for wireless backhaul and legacy traffic. Such a transport network can be built using SDH/SONET or by using a pure-packet-switched (Ethernet or MPLS) network. The main weaknesses of the latter Ethernet-switching based approach historically have been rapid fault-restoration and operations, administration and maintenance (OAM) capabilities. Recent technologies and standards that address these issues include the emerging Ethernet OAM standards, Provider Backbone Transport (PBT) and Transport-MPLS (T-MPLS).
In his discussions with the South African telecommunication roleplayers, Dr Kumar discussed the motivation for these technologies and their salient features. For more information on either this topic or the Tejas Networks communications infrastructure equipment, please contact Comtest’s Richard Lewis on +27 11 254 2200 or visit www.comtest.co.za and click on the “Tejas” link.
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