TRE-FOR Demonstrates How Utilities are helping to create the Broadband Networks of the Future
October 25, 2005
By Jason Deign, News@Cisco
Utilities firms are leading the way in broadband infrastructure deployment in Europe's Nordic countries. And they are among those that will benefit most from improvements to the Cisco Systems® Metro Ethernet fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) portfolio.
Danish utilities company TRE-FOR, which is using Cisco Metro Ethernet FTTH technology to deliver 10 Gbps of bandwidth capacity to residential customers, is a prime example of how advanced the state of metropolitan broadband infrastructure is in the region.
TRE-FOR's infrastructure is the first Cisco end-to-end fiber-to-the-home/office Equal Access Network (EAN) in Denmark and will support TV, Internet and telephone services delivered by a range of Danish and international service providers.
TRE-FOR is a public entity owned by the 120,000 inhabitants of the Southern Danish Triangle Region, a high-development area.
The utility started looking into offering fiber connections as a complement to its heating, water and electricity services around two years ago, says Keld Damsbo, head of technology for TRE-FOR Bredbånd, the broadband arm of the company.
"We wanted to supply TV, Internet and telephony much more cheaply than through traditional commercial companies," he says, "and make sure this area would be at the forefront of technology development."
Residential customers in the region currently get only two or three TV packages but the new network will enable delivery of hundreds of IPTV channels, including foreign programming of value to the large ethnic and expatriate communities in Triangle.
In addition to IPTV and, initially, analogue television, customers will be able to choose from a range of symmetrical Internet connection speeds: up to 20 Mbps for residential services and 10 Gbps with Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) for businesses.
TRE-FOR settled on an EAN as the best way to provide infrastructure that could be used by a range of service providers which, in turn, would pay the utility. Several technologies were evaluated, included passive optic networks and point-to-point active Ethernet.
Damsbo selected the latter because of shorter payback period and picked Cisco as a vendor after both the company and its technology came out highest in a scoring matrix of 22 categories.
"Only a few vendors are large enough to have a complete range of products from which to create an end-to-end network, and that was what we were looking for," he says.
The EAN, installed with help from systems integrator Unisys, was completed in August 2005 and is scheduled to be supporting 25,000 customers by 2006.
"Everything is fiber to the end customer," says Damsbo. "We are not using cable or co-ax or copper. We have looked 20 years into the future and decided it is important to go beyond what DSL can currently provide."
TRE-FOR's network core is based on Cisco 7600 Series routers while the last-mile FTTH access infrastructure relies on Cisco Catalyst® 4500 Series switches.
"We have used some of the more advanced options on the boxes," Damsbo says, citing MPLS capacity as essential to being able to provide VPN services to public communities.
TRE-FOR's next-generation network puts it in a select club of EAN operators, including the real estate company MKB Fastighets AB in Sweden and the power utility Reykjavik Energy in Iceland, that have some of the most advanced broadband networks on earth.
These next-generation network operators will be able to take advantage of an even greater range of features and capabilities from Cisco technology, thanks to a series of enhancements to the company's Metro Ethernet networking portfolio.
Top among these is the launch of a new platform, the Cisco ME3400 Ethernet Access Switch, offering secure Metro Ethernet access for residential triple play and business VPN services.
The ME3400 is the first Cisco access router optimized for both triple play, FTTH/Ethernet to the home services and layer 2 and layer 3 VPNs for business.
In addition to this enhancement to the Metro Ethernet portfolio, Cisco unveiled native support for Hierarchical-Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) on the Cisco 7600 series and 12000 series routers and Cisco Catalyst 3750 Metro and 6500 series switches.
The 7600 and 6500 series platforms have also been beefed up with new Cisco Shared Port Adapters (SPAs) and a 10 Gbps SIP-600 SPA interface processor capable of delivering data at OC192 (STM-64), 10 Gbps or 10 times 1 Gbps rates.
The Catalyst 4500 has been similarly enhanced with the addition of a 10 Gigabit Ethernet Supervisor engine and a 100BASE-X line card.
At the high end of the portfolio, the Cisco 12000 Series router now features a multi-rate (2.5 Gbps, 5 Gbps and 10 Gbps) SPA interface processor, the SIP 401, 501 and 601.
Meanwhile, the Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System is now shipping with an eight-port Gigabit Ethernet card which enables 768 Gigabit Ethernet ports per rack.
Jason Deign is a freelance writer based in Barcelona, Spain.
