 | Issue: | Asia-Pacific II 2006 |
| Article no.: | 17 | |
| Topic: | Broadband – a wider range of personal alternatives | |
| Author: | Yue Chen | |
| Title: | Chairperson | |
| Organisation: | DSL Forum’s Ambassador Working Group | |
| PDF size: | 52KB |
About author
Yue Chen is the Chairperson of the DSL Forum’s Ambassador Working Group. The DSL Forum is an international industry consortium of over 200 leading service providers, equipment manufacturers and other interested parties. Mr Chen is also a Senior Manager in Corporate Systems Engineering at Juniper Networks, Inc. Yue Chen was a founding engineer of two successful start-up companies, Arris Communications and Redstone Communications. Siemens acquired Redstone Communications in 2000 to form its US subsidiary, Unisphere Networks, later acquired by Juniper Networks. Prior to Redstone, Mr Chen developed networking equipment for Nortel/BNR, Motorola Codex, Wellfleet/Bay Networks and Cascade Communications. With over 17 years of industry experience, he actively participates and contributes to DSL Forum Architecture and Transport working group. Yue Chen holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, New York, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University, Hanzhou, China.
Article abstract
DSL is the most widely used access technology in the world. In China, alone, there are more than 26 million users, 9.5 million of which were added during the past year. The DSL Forum’s TR-101 standard combines the efficiencies, low cost and higher speed of Ethernet technology to build systems architectures with the bit rates and quality needed for advanced services such as IPTV VoIP. China was one of the first countries that started to experiment with Ethernet for DSL aggregation.
Full Article
In the early 1990s, the whistles of the dial modem signified the start of widespread web surfing in the exciting and uncharted world of the Internet. The information volume provided by service offerings back then was miniscule compared to today’s high-speed broadband connectivity services for tens of millions of business and residential users in Asia Pacific, enabled by digital subscriber line, DSL, technology. As the drive to deliver the benefits of ubiquitous broadband services to communities accelerates across the region and the globe, the challenge for service providers is to match the demand for higher speed, multimedia, multi-play broadband services. DSL is comfortably the world’s predominant broadband access technology, and continues to extend its share of the total broadband market. According to the latest figures from industry analyst Point Topic, another 41 million homes and businesses – over 112,000 every day around the world – selected DSL for their broadband connections in 2005. By year end 2005, there were 138.8 million broadband DSL subscribers globally, growing by 42 per cent in the year. China has the highest DSL population worldwide. It added close to 9.5 million new DSL subscribers in 2005, bringing the total figure to 26.4 million by December 31, 2005 – a growth of more than 55 per cent in the year. There is a clear demand for high-speed, content-rich broadband services across China. Established in 1994, the DSL Forum produces specifications that ensure service providers are able to rollout new services to customers quickly and effectively, using common platforms and practices that makes all they do easily scalable, and economical. In meeting its core objectives, the DSL Forum establishes common requirements for broadband delivery that empowers providers to provision, troubleshoot and to maintain quality broadband products and applications. A consortium of approximately 200 leading industry players covering telecommunications, networking and computing equipment firms and service providers, the DSL Forum has moved from defining the core DSL technology to establishing advanced architecture standards that are applicable across broadband technologies, such as Passive Optical Networks, PON. It also focuses on maximising effectiveness in deployment, reach and application support. The scope of the Forum’s work encompasses the full end-to-end broadband service delivery chain. By working extensively to developing network architecture standards, the DSL Forum plays a central role in shaping the broadband evolution, taking in to account the views and needs of all players involved, and enabling the interoperability of network equipment of a multitude of vendors. Open access architecture is crucial for the easy adoption of new services. The standards evolve to meet the new challenges presented by emerging applications such as video. When considering architecture requirements, providers must consider how to support a multimedia services portfolio and assess their need for more bandwidth, more features and efficient network and service management. In China, the first DSL deployments immediately sparked a proliferation of websites developed for online news, email, chat rooms and other functions. The first incarnation of DSL access was using a technique called Layer Two Tunnel Protocol, L2TP, sometimes referred to as ‘virtual dial-up’, with usable bandwidth typically limited to 128kbps to 512kbps. Advances in broadband DSL soon led to vastly improved email download performance and graphics rich web pages, enhanced with photos, music and even video. Led by the DSL Forum, the deployment of DSL worldwide quickly entered a second phase of development and eventually resulted in the approval of DSL Forum Technical Reports, TRs, TR-058, TR-059 and TR-092. Together, these specifications equip service providers with the tools to offer efficiently multiple services on one DSL line, enabling customers to receive bundled data, voice, video and mobile services. They define the marketing service requirements, architecture and detailed broadband remote access servers, BRAS, requirements using the widely deployed asynchronous transfer mode, ATM, as an aggregation technology. TR-058, TR-059 and TR-092 set out sophisticated subscriber management, with access policy and quality of service, QoS, control for service level agreement, operations, administration and management, OAM, protocols, network and subscriber security, and enable the deployment of advanced multi-cast and virtual private network, VPN, services for both residential and business subscribers. This crucial development in DSL deployment provides essential network architecture design guidance for service providers, with considerations for uniform requirements for vendor equipment selection, as well as paving the way for a wide selection of domestic and international vendors. China was one of the first countries that started to experiment with Ethernet for DSL aggregation. Standardisation and volume production of chips have made Ethernet inexpensive in most applications. However, early DSL Forum work revealed several critical gaps in existing Ethernet standards in areas such as traffic segregation and security, QoS and OAM. After almost two years of collaboration of DSL Forum members, the DSL Forum published a new Technical Report (TR-101) in April 2006, defining the architecture to seamlessly migrate asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) legacy DSL aggregation networks to next generation Ethernet-based networks. TR-101 is a key part of the DSL Forum’s expanding portfolio of tools to facilitate multiple service delivery over a range of scaleable broadband access technologies. TR-101 enables service providers to evolve their DSL access networks to better support faster rate technologies such as ADSL2plus and VDSL2. In parallel, it specifies the architecture to coordinate service rate management and multicast capability in an Ethernet network without affecting the existing service offerings. By leveraging TR-101, service providers can develop an evolutionary, multi-service end-to-end network architecture to support offerings of new secure value-added consumer and business services such as Internet Protocol Television, IPTV. TR-101 builds on TR-058, TR-059 and TR-092, extending the QoS breakthroughs of TR-059, with capabilities defined for the Broadband Network Gateway, BNG and Access Nodes such as DSLAMs that have Ethernet switching and other networking capabilities. It defines the application of Layer 2 virtual private networks, L2VPNs, and multicast replication at the various nodes as well as its operations, administration and management, OAM. The DSL Forum’s TR-101 takes advantage of the efficiencies of Ethernet technology.The benefits include reduced access aggregation network and equipment port costs, as well as reduced network bandwidth requirements, and improved speed to market of new network elements. It builds on key features of Ethernet such as VLANs, virtual local area networks, SVLANs (‘stackable’ VLANs), multicast, and the increasingly widespread availability of Ethernet equipment. By providing a venue to collaborate on a common set of requirements that can be implemented by the vendor community, the DSL Forum membership has defined a reference with TR-101 for building network elements to meet the needs of the next generation architecture. TR-101 represents a significant strategic development that will empower the continued roll out of broadband services to the mass market, over a range of access technologies. The industry’s adoption of TR-101 will expedite consumer availability of higher speed services such as IPTV that depend upon enhanced Internet access products that support high bit rate, quality, services. The potential benefit from well-implemented TR-101 architecture cannot be underestimated. As for every other nation, the rollout of IPTV services is top of the agenda for China, although regulatory restrictions on broadcast for the service providers still impose hurdles. Video on Demand in the meantime has taken off in a rare form. Chinese and Korean soap operas and ‘xiangsheng’, a Chinese equivalent of stand-up comedy, are widely available on the Internet, with or without the support of service providers. Service providers are developing voice over IP, VoIP, although there is some concern that it will cannibalise providers’ existing telephone lines. Those are best-effort services without assurance of quality or serviceability. End-to-end, the DSL Forum is driving innovation. Together, its TRs provide interfaces and parameters for information flows, including automated configuration, diagnostics, quality of service, QoS, and other management functions for voice, data and video services. Their implementation allows service providers to deliver multiple services simultaneously and with assured Quality of Experience, QoE. The work of the DSL Forum paves the way for the economic rollout of multiple broadband services to the mass market, over a range of broadband access technologies. With the combination of IPTV and guaranteed quality VoIP, as well as other value-added services, there is potential for service providers to significantly increase their average revenue per user, ARPU, for DSL subscribers in China, and across Asia Pacific. http://www.dslforum.org/techwork/treports.shtml.
