Business need

While cable operators have already established themselves as the leaders in delivering data and video services, VoIP services complete the “triple-play”. Telephony services allow you to build long-term customer value and loyalty while enhancing bottom line business results. VoIP holds the promise of helping you reduce churn and add as much as $40 per-month in revenue per-subscriber, but only if you can deliver the reliability and service quality subscribers have come to expect from the Public Switched Telephone Network.

Challenges

Your VoIP services must exhibit quality and availability levels at least on par with services offered by incumbent telephone service providers. This means low latency, jitter and packet loss as well as extremely fast protection switching. Current offerings based on routed networks that use Layer 3 mechanisms for re-routing around failures take precious seconds to restore connections, and they require excessive router hops, which can degrade the QoS levels required for real-time voice calls while adding cost.

Solution

By implementing Optical Ethernet switching and transport, you can deliver the reliability and the QoS levels essential for VoIP services. You can go beyond the “best-effort” service levels required for data services to offer carrier-grade voice services that increase revenues-per-subscriber and allow you to address new commercial market opportunities.

Ciena's offerings

Ciena's field-proven VoIP transport offerings minimize CAPEX while optimizing service quality. Optical Ethernet platforms from Ciena offer VirtualWire capabilities so you can pipeline VoIP traffic directly between the d-hub and the headend without the need for any router hops in transit. SONET-like performance monitoring and fault isolation combined with advanced optical power monitoring enable protection switching in as little as 50 microseconds—1,000 times faster than SONET. A triple-play optimized Ethernet Services Provisioning Switch at the headend switches the VoIP signaling and bearer packets with zero packet loss and deterministic, low latency and jitter. Optical Ethernet transport over DWDM in the backbone allows cable operators to regionally centralize the Call Management Server, PSTN gateways and border gateways while ensuring high quality connections.

Benefits

• Create long-term subscriber relationships by offering high-quality residential telephony services
• Profitably deliver robust VoIP services with guaranteed QoS
• Reduce CAPEX and OPEX by driving down the number of network elements you need to deploy and manage
• Deliver the reliability and availability levels your subscribers demand
• Optimize the use of Call Management Server and gateway platforms by deploying them centrally over a high-performance transport network