Colocation Solutions Featured Article

 

 

ADTRAN provides networking and communications equipment, with a portfolio of more than 1,700 solutions used in the “last mile” of telecom networks. Commonly deployed by carriers and enterprises alike, ADTRAN solutions enable voice, data, video, and Internet communications across copper, fiber, and wireless network infrastructures. ADTRAN solutions are now used by every major U.S. service provider and many global ones, along with thousands of public, private and governmental organizations worldwide.

 

ADTRAN’s n-Command MSP is a network management platform for remote monitoring and management of ADTRAN NetVanta or Total Access converged networking solutions. This web-based platform simplifies new device deployment and enables Managed Service Providers (MSPs), service providers and enterprise IT organizations to deliver on Service Level Agreements (SLAs), improve customer service response times, reduce network downtimes and proactively monitor and report the performance of VoIP networks, all while reducing operational costs.

 

ADTRAN n-Command MSP platform allows network managers to view and report current and historical VoIP performance statistics, automate individual or network-wide firmware upgrades and configuration backups, simplify installation and turn up, improve asset tracking and inventory management, and monitor and report on the overall health of the network by location or customer. Centralized collection and reporting for Voice Quality Monitoring (VQM) is also provided, which provides voice performance metrics including Mean Opinion Score (MOS), jitter, delay and packet loss for each voice call. The n-Command MSP platform consolidates the VQM data and provides current and historical VoIP performance for each device in the network.

 

Aside from a user-friendly GUI and advanced VoIP management capabilities, the n-Command MSP system is also firewall-friendly. ADTRAN’s “Auto Link” feature enables each remote device to initiate pre-scheduled communication back to the n-Command MSP server, thus facilitating communication across existing firewalls and ensures networks remain secure. The n-Command MSP system includes an ADTRAN NetVanta Server 450, A compact, 1U high, 19-inch rackmount server that can support up to 5,000 remotely managed devices.

 

The product manager for ADTRAN’s “n-Command MSC (News - Alert) Network Management Platform,” Jaime Britnell, says, “The challenges faced by service providers involve large deployments of devices: managing firmware and configuration files across their network, such as backing up the configuration files and managing them so that if a customer’s service goes down the configuration can be immediately restored. But other than having disparate systems spread across various applications in the NOC (News - Alert), we see a convergence of having all of those under one umbrella application. Then there’s the overall growth of broadband, and the fact that many of these data services are adding voice, so your ITSPs or service providers are moving over to a VoIP architecture for their voice and data applications.”

 

“Another trend we see is the need to monitor and verify voice quality,” says Britnell. “There are many definitions as to what voice quality is and how it can be measured, ranging from things like MOS [Medium Opinion Score] scores to metrics concerning packet loss, delay and jitter. All of these lead you to help define and solve voice quality issues on the customer’s network. Helping customers with these kinds of things have driven ADTRAN’s product development in terms of things such as our n-Command product.”

 

ADTRAN’s senior product manager for voice products, Chris Thompson, says, “Different providers are looking for solutions to monitor voice quality, Quality of Experience [QoE] or whatever term you want to use, be it for troubleshooting or for maintaining SLAs. We’ve done things product-wise from a CPE and not necessarily from a service provider perspective, but we have been working with other vendors to incorporate some of the more standards-based voice quality reporting mechanisms that are emerging, such as the SIPing RTCP summary draft where you can simply package up all of your voice quality scores into a SIP PUBLISH or SIP NOTIFY message and send them to third party systems such as Brix, Empirix or Tektronix (News - Alert) to do a correlation of voice quality statistics network-wide, and not just against ADTRAN CPE devices.”

 

 

Comptel Corporation, an international software company specializing in telecom, offers Operations Support Systems (OSS) solutions to telecom operators so they can effectively deliver and charge for services to their customers.

 

Roar Tørum, Comptel’s Solutions Manager, “Our four target areas are fulfillment and network planning, supporting the service assurance process and also asset management. Some of the things we see are IP-based next-gen networks and IMS making the network more unified. The access networks are still there, and to a certain extent they’re becoming more complicated, which is what service providers need to take into account. For example, femtocells and picocells are being introduced, so you have more nodes appearing closer to the customers. The operators will have to stretch to be closer to the customers with their access technology on both the radio side and on the fixed side with fiber-to-the-home.

 

“In Europe it’s quite common that the responsibility of the operator stops at the building. Whatever happens inside is the responsibility of the building owner, not the network operator. But in the case of fiber-to-the-home, part of the big value of the operator’s network actually occurs inside the premises, particularly in bigger cities. This also applies to femtocells and more mobile indoor coverage. This means that the complexity of the network will remain in the access part of the network, but not necessarily in the provisioning of the access network.

 

“You won’t provide a DSL line to the customer; instead you’ll have a lot of infrastructure in place before you start doing the provisioning of the service. In essence, all of these things together make planning and rolling out a network more complicated, and there are also more complicated processes in place with most operators today, but some semi-automation is occurring and there are systems resembling order management that give you some control over the planning and execution processes when you’re about to modify a base station or whatever.”