By Howard Baldwin, Contributing Columnist

How many problems can broadband Internet access solve?

U.S. television news commentator Tom Brokaw, a native of South Dakota, wrote a compelling essay in the New York Times several years ago, asking why his home state and North Dakota, with a population of 1.5 million, maintained some 17 institutes of higher education. He noted that it was “a carry-over from the early 20th century when travel was more difficult and farm families wanted their children close by during harvest season.”

He posed a very rational question: “Couldn’t the two states get a bigger bang for their higher education buck if they consolidated their smaller institutions into, say, the Dakota Territory College System, with satellite campuses but a common administration and shared standards?”

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Tags: applications, broadband, education, healthcare, IP NGN, rural, TelePresence

SONET and SDH, while well established and highly reliable technologies, were optimized for an era of TDM voice communications - before cloud computing, VoIP, cell phones, mobile tablets, Video CDNs and even the Internet increased network complexity and radically changed traffic patterns. This infrastructure has delivered reliable transport because it is easy to provision, troubleshoot, and provides a high level of resiliency. However, with the increase in IP traffic and changing traffic patterns, a new solution is required: one that provides the ‘trust’ of SONET/SDH with the ‘efficiency’ and ‘agility’ of packet.

Today Cisco is announcing our latest innovation, the Cisco Carrier Packet Transport (CPT) System. Our goal is to enable the transport network in a way that combines the reliability and simplicity of point-and-click provisioning of SONET/SDH along with the efficiency and flexibility of IP/MPLS. 

Service providers generate a lot of revenue from connection-oriented services like leased lines. However the growth of these services from a revenue perspective is slow. New services based on cloud, mobile, and video are IP based and have huge growth potential. Service providers need to address this growing traffic and need to do so profitably. They need to find ways to lower the cost of transport and simultaneously tap into new applications that increase the average revenue per user. The Cisco Carrier Packet Transport System helps them do exactly that!

Of course, new technology can be overwhelming. So, it’s important to deliver all the benefits of packet technology without sacrificing the trust of transport. With the Cisco CPT System, service providers can build a packet transport infrastructure with the same reliability and familiar operational models of SONET/SDH. Standards-based MPLS-TP allows for robust packet connection-oriented control. Cisco’s Premier Integrated Management Experience (PRIME) offers service providers an A-Z point-and-click network management system. Both wavelengths and MPLS-TP label switch paths are provisioned in an easy “point-and-click” fashion autonomously or from a single integrated domain. This integrated solution provides opex savings and eliminates the need for overhaul and extensive employee re-training.

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Tags: carrier packet transport, cisco prime, cpt, CPT 200, CPT 50, CPT 600, DWDM, IP NGN, mpls, MPLS-TP, Optical, OTN, p-ots, packet-optical transport system, sdh, sonet

The rapid proliferation of smartphones and the growing popularity of advanced mobile applications is well documented and often discussed and debated.  Central to this is how mobile service providers are responding to this change in service types and addressing the rising expectations of mobile users.

Our daily interaction with the internet and its ability to inform and entertain has colored our expectations.  Now as we “go mobile” with the internet, we bring along our fixed line expectations.  We expect high throughput, high reliability, and high quality, no matter the application, no matter the access, no matter the location.  Considering we’re now talking about high-bandwidth applications like music streaming, video, and web conferencing, as opposed to voice calls and text messaging, this is no small challenge for a mobile operator.

In order to provide these types of services quickly and reliably across a widely dispersed geography, operators like Telenor Norway are evolving their networks to 4G IP infrastructures.  Cisco, as the recognized leader in IP, provides a comprehensive IP next-generation mobile network architecture that enables operators to build a high performance, highly intelligent 4G network with end-to-end security, reliability and tremendous flexibility.

Such a network enables today’s smartphones and advanced applications and allows operators to personalize the customer experience, deliver high-quality multimedia applications, explore new business models and develop innovative new mobile services.

At the heart of this network is the Cisco ASR 5000 mobile multimedia core.  The ASR 5000 is a purpose-built platform featuring a distributed architecture, high-performance, high capacity, and high availability, combined with subscriber and network intelligence. Read More »

Tags: ASR 5000, EPC, IP NGN, LTE, mobile applications, mobile internet, mobile packet core, Service Provider