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Redback Enables Business VoIP, VPN, and Broadband Services for North American Independent Local Exchange Carrier

The SmartEdge Multi-Service Edge Router enables this provider to enhance the scalability and reliability of their residential broadband network to accommodate the increasing bandwidth needs of a growing customer base, and expand their business service offering with VoIP and MPLS VPNs.

This leading independent local exchange carrier in the Untied States has more than 75 years of history in the telecommunications industry.  While their residential and business customers often take a conservative approach towards adopting new services, the overall shift in the telecommunications industry to IP-based technologies has driven the provider to implement a strategy for growth as their customer base begins to more rapidly adopt emerging new broadband services.  With increasing demand for VoIP, MPLS-based Virtual Private Networks, and personalized bundled services, the provider needed not only to augment their network capacity, but also to create a network capable of delivering innovative new services to capitalize on critical growth opportunities.  Redback’s SmartEdge Multi-Service Edge Router (MSER) enabled this provider to design and deploy a broadband network that was able to meet their increasing scalability requirements while also simplifying the introduction of emerging new services.

Situation
As a market leader with over two million access lines across 25 states, this Independent Local Exchange Carrier has traditionally provided essential voice and data communications services to its customers, emphasizing reliability and attention to customer service as key differentiators. With a customer base that has been more concerned with practical usage needs than adopting bleeding edge services for the sake of advancing technology, this provider’s focus on delivering established services with reliability enabled the company to achieve ongoing success. As an incumbent in many of its rural markets, the provider places great emphasis on maintaining long-term relationships with customers by keeping track of key local trends in its various markets.

Recently, as with other carriers in the overall telecom industry, this carrier faces intense competition on many fronts throughout a number of its key markets. Cable operators, wireless providers, overlay service providers, and other telcos have been pursuing opportunities in this carrier’s native operating areas. By leveraging new broadband technologies to reach previously untapped customers, these competitors are primarily targeting business services, a market with an estimated opportunity of $1.5 billion to $2 billion in annual revenue. As a result, this provider has recently seen a steady decline in its traditional wireline access business. The company is losing approximately 4-5% of access lines per quarter as customers progressively adopt alternative technologies such as VoIP or wireless for primary line services. Also complicating the picture is the decline in wholesale network access revenue.

To fight back, the provider needed to address two main areas in the near-term to retain its current customer base and provide a foundation for growth: scaling its residential broadband services, and enhancing its business service portfolio to create a complete solution. With an ongoing initiative to promote residential DSL adoption through growing its broadband service offering, this provider needed to improve subscriber session scalability in areas of its existing network. For business services, VoIP and advanced IP-VPN capabilities were essential to create a cost-effective service offering and help build the provider’s value as a ‘one stop shop.’

Solution
With immediate requirements to enhance existing services, and a long-term strategy to operate a single IP network for both residential and business services, the provider chose the SmartEdge MSER for its ability to help achieve these goals in a simple, scalable, and reliable manner.

As seen in the figure, Business and Residential Services Network, this provider’s residential and business services are carried across a common IP backbone for inter-regional transport. The SmartEdge MSER is deployed both in the residential edge network for consumer broadband services, and in the business services network to enable MPLS VPNs, VoIP, and high-speed Internet services.

At this stage, the provider operates separate networks for business and residential services, but is able to leverage the versatility of a common SmartEdge MSER platform to address the distinct needs in each of these domains. With this foundation for consistent service creation, the provider will be able to easily cater to emerging service convergence trends as residential and business applications begin to overlap. As migration towards underlying network convergence becomes organizationally feasible, the provider will already have the network elements in place to create a single converged broadband network for business and residential services.

Residential Services
Faced with intermittent instability in their existing edge routers, the carrier’s immediate need was to migrate to a platform with higher reliability and consistent performance. Along with this, an increase in broadband service adoption was imminent and would require higher scalability than possible with the provider’s existing edge routers. The carrier was challenged with a limitation of 8,000 subscribers per platform in their existing solution, and would need multiple edge routers to serve larger locations, leading to increased operational complexity and additional capital spending.

The SmartEdge MSER addressed the carrier’s scalability requirements for future growth with the ability to handle tens of thousands of user sessions per platform. The provider could reduce the number of network elements needed even as they expanded their coverage areas, lowering both capital expenditure and operational costs by simplifying network design.

Network availability was also significantly improved by using the SmartEdge MSER. With an expanding service portfolio, the carrier had to ensure maximum network uptime. With fully redundant hardware, completely modular software, and stateful failover capability, the SmartEdge MSER provided this provider with a robust service creation platform able to continuously provide services even in the event of a control module failure.

Advanced service creation features such as Circuit Creation On-Demand (CCOD) for both legacy ATM infrastructure and new Ethernet-based deployment provided the carrier with the means to dynamically provision user circuits as needed. Not only did this feature enable automatic user provisioning, but it also optimized network resources, eliminating the need to pre-allocate and activate subscriber circuits that often remained idle.

Business Services
The provider also needed to supplement its business service offering with VoIP and enhanced VPN capabilities as rising competition was primarily targeting business customers in the provider’s coverage areas. Traditional voice and data services over legacy leased-line or frame relay WAN technologies were no longer sufficient to serve the needs of an increasingly sophisticated customer base.

The SmartEdge MSER enabled the provider to introduce VoIP and IP-VPN services with the highest levels of availability. For business customers, service disruption for any period of time could result in a breach of service level commitments with financial repercussions. In addition to being a fully redundant and fault-tolerant platform, the SmartEdge MSER enabled the provider to perform in-service software upgrades, alleviating the need for planned maintenance windows. Support for graceful restart protocols ensured network-level resiliency in the event of peripheral outages from other network elements.

Virtual context technology on the SmartEdge MSER not only enabled this carrier to natively offer secure, scalable, and manageable IP-VPN services, but also provided a mechanism to efficiently offer VoIP services. With this configuration, additional network elements were not needed for connectivity between VoIP network components such as the session border controller and the softswitch.

Benefits
In order to effectively capitalize on emerging broadband opportunities, this carrier chose the SmartEdge MSER to meet its needs for scalable growth and new service introduction. With industry-leading scalability of up to tens of thousands of concurrent customer sessions on a single platform and an unmatched feature set for unified service creation, the SmartEdge MSER enabled the carrier to reliably sustain its growth in residential broadband services, and profitably maintain its competitiveness in business services.

Integrated functionality to provide a wide range of services on a single platform is a key strength of the SmartEdge MSER that will enable this carrier to further optimize its network going forward. Additional benefits inherent to selecting a SmartEdge MSER-based architecture are lowered operational and capital costs through simplified provisioning and a reduction in the number of network elements needed.