Thursday, September 10th | 11am EDT

TDM/SONET networking equipment is approaching end-of-life and therefore is creating a significant pain for regional carriers. 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. This sunsetting of SONET creates 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 transport 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 September 10th 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

Elizabeth Page
National Sales Director
Ribbon

WEBINAR: TDM/SONET to Packet: Transport Network Migration for the Regional Carrier

Thursday, September 10th | 11am EDT

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TDM Migration to IP Optical

As many of us on the call probably know, SONET and SDH were just wildly successful. I made my early career in the SONET world. It has been around for 30 years. It's kind of like McDonald’s. A bunch of different equipment has been used, with billions of dollars spent in this equipment leading to billions of individuals served and a couple of millions of nodes deployed around the world. It was ideal technology for its era and was built around an N by 64 kilobit kind of voice based multiplexing hierarchy. It’s not exactly today's world, but it was “today's world” for a very long time and there's a lot of this technology out there. A lot of the SONET/SDH equipment is finally sunsetting. And to a degree, it depends on whose equipment you have. If you have your equipment from a highly reliable vendor, that network may not be experiencing any problems. But there's lots of different vendors out there and some of this equipment is starting to have some troubles as these networks are end of life in the service. One of the common problems that we see when talking to customers is just difficulty getting spares. Some people are resorting to the things like e-bay. I do not mean to make a joke about this because people are suffering and looking for spares in the under-desk local warehouse. There are even cases where multiple organizations and a single service provider build different SONET networks for different things and sometimes they're competing with each other for a few spares that are left. It is just a really tough situation right now. A lot of the vendors that are still supporting your SONET gear have raised the of maintenance and support and sometimes there's special expertise required to engineer.

These networks have been around for a long time and they're becoming operationally costly and they are becoming, in many cases, a large outage risk.

Even though the equipment is approaching end of life and the equipment is becoming an outage risk, the TDM interfaces and the service requirements are actually kind of sticking around. That makes for a awkard problem. One example is a voice/trunk interconnection between carriers. So the Service Provider is delivering a voice service and it needs to hand off voice trunks to maybe even more than one ILEC and a lot of those trunk handoffs are either DS1 or DS3s. So I need a DS3 interface on the edge of my network and a DS1 to whatever ILEC I’m interfacing with even though I have the capability to run like sip trunks. Both in the US and in Canada there are financial or regulatory incentives to maintain in the DS1 and DS3 handoff at those locations. The endpoints are going to be fixed but how do I provide infrastructure that can deal with those legacy endpoints and do it so that it maintains the network.

A second case can be that small, medium business or even large enterprise, who actually still want their DS1s, DS3s, and there SONET circuit handoff to the service provider. It's been a decade long activity for many service providers to sort of encourage their enterprise users to move away from TDM private line circuits toward the ethernet, but there may be some reason why that's just not convenient for the enterprise. But for whatever reason the customer still wants to interface to the Service Provider with a DS1, DS3 or SONET surface. The problem is then how to satisfy the interface requirements and the service requirements while replacing the infrastructure?