Thursday, September 10th | 11am EDT

TDM/SONET networking equipment is approaching end-of-life and therefore is creating a significant pain for MSO's. These pain points include not being able to obtain spares, not being able to add circuits, and not being able to find knowledgeable operations staff. Worse yet, SONET is used everywhere – even though your voice products have been SIP-based, your trunking to the PSTN is still SONET-based. The ubiquity of sunsetting SONET creates a significant risk of network outages and high operational costs.

However, despite these challenges - there are continued requirements for the delivery of DS1, DS3, and OC-N circuits for a broad range of applications. So what can you do?

First off, we're here to help! Ribbon's TDM to IP migration solution enables service providers to continue to provide DS1 and DS3 circuits, but deliver those legacy circuit types over a modern, scalable Ethernet or MPLS infrastructure.

Join us on October 14th as we discuss these topics and more:
 

• Example network applications that require the transport of TDM traffic;
• Technologies that enable TDM traffic to be carried over Ethernet and MPLS networks;
• Unique aspects of the Ribbon Neptune solution set.

Sam Lisle
Director of Business Development
Ribbon

Todd Sivie
Director of IP and Optical Sales
Ribbon

WEBINAR: TDM Migration Solutions for Multiple Service Operators (MSO’s)

Tuesday, September 29th | 11am EDT

First Name: * Last Name: * Work Email: * Company: * Title: *  

As most of you probably know, SONET / SDH was a wildly successful swiss army knife and it's been deployed since the 1990’s around the world. Millions of nodes have been deployed, billions of dollars have been spent on that equipment, and it exists in a very wide variety of forms like ADMs, cross connects and other kinds of ancillary equipment in all kinds of sizes. It has served literally dozens of different applications everywhere from, long distance to inter-office, access networks, voice data video. It was doing mobile backhaul back in the days of 2G and 3G. It was really the ideal technology for a universe that was built around kind of multiples of 64 KB multiplexing, which is not exactly today's world anymore. This equipment is out there in mass and is finally sunsetting because it’s a more ethernet and IP world today. These TDM networks are everywhere and have been either end of life for a while, or are approaching end of life, right now. And this is causing folks, just all sorts of headaches, in particular, difficulties with sparing. Again, you know, talk to a customer or two a week on this and you, almost universally, somebody out there has some kind of SONET/SDH network and they're getting their spares on e-bay some local warehouse. And that's just an awful situation for people to be and there's a lot of fear that if a card is lost, there’s going to be an outage. Maintenance and support costs are also very high for the equipment that is not technically end of life. A lot of the vendors are raising the support fees. Lot of these networks have special expertise that is required, fewer and fewer technicians, know how to do things like DS1 wire wrap, which used to be a big deal back in the day. These systems are very space and power hungry. So, there are cases where a service provider is running out of room in the office.

This problem has been looming for many years but it's really starting to hit folk's pretty hard right about now.

While the equipment is kind of a dying, the TDM interfaces and handoffs themselves and the service requirements associated with those handoffs were sticking around. Generally, the fall and a couple of categories. The first is DS3 and DS1 voice trunk interconnections to incumbent local exchange carriers. So, for example, there are service providers here that are delivering the voice service. In order to deliver that voice service, they have to hand trunks off to other ILECs and those trunk handoffs are DS3 or DS1, at least in the United States and maybe Canada as well, there's a financial and regulatory incentive to sort of maintain that kind of TDM handoff as you go between carriers.

The second flavor of application that we're seeing a lot of, is business enterprise customers and they still want their DS1s , DS3 and OCNs to hand off to the service provider and they still want the service characteristics associated with the TDMs. And usually, the reason the enterprise wants this, is because maybe their routers are already equipped with DS1 interfaces, or maybe it's sensitive traffic and they don't want to roll away from DS1. Sometimes there's specialized equipment like computing, front end processor if you remember those things and those things really function best with a TDM interface. Most service providers would rather see the enterprise customer roll onto an ethernet or an IP service but sometimes the enterprise need what they need, DS1s and DS3s.

So the question then is they've got all this aging infrastructure how can I get out of that problem and minimize my risk of outage and cost but still deliver the interfaces and the service requirements that are needed for the application?