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SmartEdge 100 Delivers Video, Voice, and Data for Small and Medium Sized Networks

Today’s service providers cannot just deliver a single service but multiple services encompassing video, voice and data.  The key enabler for these services is high speed broadband, which for many people has become a basic utility like telephone service or electricity.  And with increasing broadband speeds, consumers are benefiting from an increasing number of options that are available to them through the Internet.  For both large and small service providers, building a highly reliable broadband network is the foundation for delivering video, voice, and data services.  Large, global providers have plenty of options when it comes to selecting equipment to meet their needs.  The SmartEdge 100 was designed to address the needs of smaller network environment and provide the same reliability and resiliency that is available to larger networks.

Smaller service providers are often the first to adopt new technologies and introduce new services.  Like any company, they are driven by the needs of their customers, and many of them have forged ahead with new video services and distance learning programs driven by the needs of their market.  Despite a smaller network environment, the requirements to deliver video, voice, and data are no different from those of the larger network operators. 

Golden Belt Telephone Association (GBTA) serves the rural western Kansas community and has built a next generation broadband network to deliver IPTV.  The IPTV service is an alternative to satellite television service and includes local news and weather stations that are not available on the national satellite television service.  In addition, the Kansas Research and Education Network (KanREN) offers a distance learning program over GBTA’s broadband network, eliminating the need for western Kansas residents to drive several hours to attend classes in person. 

The SmartEdge 100 MSER was designed to be deployed in smaller network environments.  Whether the service provider has an international footprint across continents or serves a rural community, they inevitably have some parts of the network that do not require hundreds of gigabytes or throughput.  Optimized to deliver video, voice, and data over a single, converged network, the SmartEdge 100 delivers the carrier class reliability and service enabling capabilities that are required to deliver world class services. 

Consumer and Business Services
Today’s networks are being stretched as bandwidth and throughput requirements grow with the growth of video services.  As the network’s ability to handle increasingly resource intensive applications, service providers are extending capacity and adding service capabilities just to keep pace with traffic growth.  Over time, their networks will become overly complex, and they will then need to simplify their networks in order to maintain a scalable operations model.  

One of the keys to building a scalable operations model is to converge business and consumer services onto a common network infrastructure.  With its support of Ethernet and ATM interfaces, the SmartEdge 100 can be used by service providers to deliver both residential and business services on a common network infrastructure.  By mapping ATM VCs to VLANs and leveraging the point-to-point or point-to-multipoint tunneling protocols such as VPLS, SmartEdge 100 MSERs can help service providers migrate services from their legacy ATM networks to next generation broadband networks based on Ethernet. 

The SmartEdge 100 is able to deliver both consumer and business services with its comprehensive IP support and granular QoS capabilities.  With its integrated DHCP server, the SmartEdge 100 can intelligently control IP address allocation and identify end users services such as IPTV or business VPNs.  The granular QoS capabilities can create a personalized broadband experience for every user in a multi-tenant building or a geographic area.  Whether the end user is being serviced by ATM or Ethernet, the SmartEdge 100 can provide prioritization of bandwidth (speed) for one user while policing (metering) the bandwidth of another user.

Purpose Built for Carrier Networks
The SmartEdge 100 router was purpose built to be carrier-class.  The product’s architecture has been optimized to provide IP based services at the edge of the network connecting the service provider to residential and enterprise broadband customers.  By integrating three separate functions into a single, scalable platform, the SmartEdge 100 can be used as an edge router and simultaneously as a broadband remote-access server (BRAS) to directly connect customers to the network.   

Service providers increasingly require subscriber awareness for triple-play, broadband, and wholesale access while migrating from ATM to Gigabit Ethernet. For edge routing applications, the SmartEdge 100 supports a variety of routing protocols and vital services, including Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), Intermediate system to intermediate system (IS-IS), a feature rich implementation of  quality of service (QoS), and Virtual Private Networks (VPN). New services can easily be added with software upgrades thanks to Redback’s own software programmable packet processing ASIC.

The SmartEdge 100 router supports a wide variety of interfaces, such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) OC3c-STM-1, Ethernet 10Base-T, 100Base-TX, 100Base-FX, 1000Base-FX, and 1000Base-T.  The SmartEdge 100 shares the same operating system as the other members of SmartEdge family of products. SmartEdge OS is the advanced, multi-threaded software system that works in conjunction with the ASIC-based SmartEdge hardware products to provide a scalable and robust multi-service platform that provides services to over 60 million broadband users worldwide.