Multimedia over fiber lights Hong Kong

By GRACE F. MURPHY

Hongkong Telecom expects to have several hundred thousand residential customers for its interactive multimedia service within two years, and is using Fujitsu switches cap-able of handling 80 Gbits/sec to manage the traffic.

The communications provider has 3.4 million fiber-optic lines installed throughout the territory, and began offering its interactive multimedia service in 1997. Services include video-on-demand, music-on-demand, online banking, and home shopping services.

When building the service, Hongkong Telecom wanted equipment flexible enough to grow with the size of the customer base. Anticipating several hundred thousand residential customers by 2000, the company searched for a scalable switch that could handle a range of traffic. It ended up acquiring the Fujitsu fetex-150 esp Asynchronous Transfer Mode (atm) system, which has up to 80 Gbits/sec switching capacity through 622-Mbit/sec interface ports.

The system provides the interface capacity to scale from 20 to 640 Gbits/sec. Open interfaces allow for interconnection with other products that are compliant with industry standards. Each switch can support up to 1024 OC-3c (155-Mbit/sec) or 256 OC-12c (599.04-Mbit/sec) channels, and the capacity of each switch depends on the number of customers served.

"[The switch] leads the market in size and scalability, while maintaining the full robustness and redundancy required for the public carrier market," said Hongkong Telecom official Harry Takeichi in a prepared statement.

Fujitsu, Richardson, TX, shipped the switches to Hongkong Telecom in 1996. The company has installed four of the switches already, and up to 10 will be in service by the end of the year. Additional interactive applications will be added this year, and officials say prospective offerings, such as broadband data services for commercial customers, are being tested.

Hongkong Telecom`s digital media centers, which include video servers, control servers, and electronic commerce services, are connected to Fujitsu`s atm switches. Traffic runs from the switches over the Synchronous Optical Network backbone to local exchange networks. If copper cable is used to connect the network to the building, the traffic runs through a host digital terminal via asynchronous digital technology. Otherwise, fiber-optic cable connects the host digital terminal with an optical network unit (onu) in the basement of residential units, where traffic is switched to copper cable before dropping to the set-top box.

nec Corp., Tokyo, provides the set-top boxes at the subscriber premises, and has a contract to provide 250,000 set-top boxes through 1999. nec also provides the video services that the boxes set up sessions with, according to Richard Moran, director of business development for nec America Inc. The interactive sessions are managed, set up, and set down by the server and set-top box signaling to each other. Hongkong Telecom uses nec`s nebax 2000 equipment for the set-top boxes, nebax 300 for the onus, and nebax 200 for the host digital terminals. q