October 26, 2005 Austin, TX -- General Bandwidth announced that it has implemented its PseudoWire Emulation End-to-End (PWE3) technology in its G6 Universal Media Gateway. The company says the technology allows carriers to migrate legacy services onto video and data packet networks incorporating IPTV/FTTN and GPON platforms.
According to the company, with the advent of IPTV and packet technologies, carriers often have two very different access networks - an older one based in TDM and a newer one based on packet and IP technologies. Carriers, says the company, are therefore faced with the difficult prospect of either maintaining their old and new access networks, or incurring the costs of migrating all TDM customers to packet-based services such as VoIP.
The company says that PWE3 technology provides another access packetization option that has inherent advantages over VoIP. According to the company, as an emerging standard supported by the Metro Ethernet Forum and IETF, the PWE3 technology enables legacy service transport over Ethernet, IP, and MPLS networks, including support for both TDM-based voice and point-to-point data services. Requiring no protocol conversions, the company says that PWE3 performs a simple packetization of the TDM information so that it can be transported through the packet access network but remain unchanged at either destination, according to the company.
The company notes that Digital Loop Carriers (DLCs) and business services like T1 and PRI make up a large component of the TDM access network, and these services can be easily transported over the IPTV packet network via PWE3. The company says its NEBS3-certified, carrier class G6 platform serves as the central office or headend aggregation point and terminates these PWE3 TDM services into Class 5 switches or routers. However, according to the company, when a customer eventually subscribes to new VoIP services, a unique feature of the G6 platform allows it to convert the TDM voice traffic to VoIP for control by softswitches or SIP application servers.
"Moving to a single, unified access network is now a reachable goal," contends Charles Vogt, president and CEO of General Bandwidth. "No service provider wants to be burdened by the costs of operating two vastly different networks, and we have developed a universal, cost-effective solution to ensure that legacy services can easily be transported over these new access networks and connected to either their legacy or next generation destinations."