November 8, 2004 Tel Aviv, Israel and Aldermaston, UK -- RAD Data Communications has announced that at Telecom Israel, to be held in Tel Aviv in November, it will unveil a customer-located Ethernet network termination unit (E-NTU) that provides a clear demarcation point between user and operator networks, permitting end-to-end control of Ethernet services in the fiber local loop.
Owned and operated by the service provider, RAD's new ETX-102 allows the operator to separate each user's traffic and offer services such as inter-office LAN connectivity, Internet access, and secure virtual private networks (VPNs). This approach extends the service provider's reach over fiber, facilitating management of differentiated services up to the customer premises while ensuring service level agreement (SLA) enforcement.
The ETX-102 carries Ethernet traffic between the customer premises and the network edge. It maintains Ethernet as the access technology not only for packet-switched networks such as Ethernet and IP/MPLS, but also for legacy backbones such as ATM and SDH/SONET, where the edge device has an Ethernet tributary access port. The ETX-102 enables managed service with a scalable, granular solution, supporting Ethernet access rates up to 100 Mbits/sec. This enables the service provider to offer Ethernet service at incremental access rates.
The product is designed to serve users' growing need for various Ethernet-based services. Service differentiation is enabled at the customer premises by providing per-service rate limitation and traffic prioritization. VLAN stacking (QinQ) allows mapping the user's traffic, including the user's VLAN, to the carrier's service VLAN, thus providing transparency and scalability. The ETX-102 allows easy provisioning and control of service speed by applying rate limitation to the user's traffic at the customer premises.