Telco Systems’ T-Marc 3348S has been shortlisted for the 2014 Telecoms.com Awards and we decided to talk to Nir Halachmi, product line manager for Telco Systems, on what makes this 10G Ethernet NID a leap forward in 10GE Carrier Ethernet and MPLS service delivery for service providers and mobile operators.
Nir Halachmi
What are the highlights of Telco Systems’ T-Marc 3348S?
The T-Marc 3348S 10GE Ethernet/MPLS demarcation device offers an all-in-one solution that meets the increasing challenge of mobile operators, mobile backhaul wholesale and service providers to cost effectively connect base stations and controller sites running LTE and LTE Advanced, and to offer heavy duty cloud services using 10GE capacity. T-Marc 3348S provides multiple types of services to allow providers and operators to deliver business services and mobile backhaul while standardizing on one product for different applications.
Other highlights include:
- True purposed design 10G Ethernet NID (as oppose to aggregators that are used as NIDs)
- Small – T-Marc 3348S is a half rack shelf system allowing installation of two units in a 19” rack, compared to most 10GE NIDs which are 1RU full shelf size
- Density and capacity – 4x10GE +1GEx12 ports NID 54GE capacity – Four 10GE ports are crucial for networks that require 2 ports toward the ring and 2 customer facing ports for E-NNI or 2 ports for each sides of the rings creating protected double ring
- MPLS and Ethernet on the same product
- Low power consumption reduces OPEX
- Deployment flexibility for 1GE or 10GE per port using SFP+ technology – its high port density was designed to allow it to support small cells installations as well as macro cells with multiple technology generations
We believe that this product will allow mobile operators and wholesale backhaul providers to standardize using one product, simplifying their installation model as well as creating major operational savings.
What challenges does this solution help to solve?
- T-Marc 3348S solves several challenges service providers are facing:
- The evolution of LTE and LTE Advanced, along with new architectures like small cells and C-RAN, create the need for more than 1GE demarcation solutions. Due to the fact that these connections require high resiliency, in order to create non-blocking networks, service providers now require multiple 10GE connections at the demarcation point
- As the gap between the average revenue per user (ARPU) and the demand for higher bandwidth grows, providers are looking for ways to better control their expenses. T-Marc 3348S, with its low power consumption and high capacity, allows providers to better control their OPEX while providing higher bandwidth and more services
- Due to the fact that fiber is expensive and limited, service providers are looking for better ways to utilize it while serving many customers. Though in the past, WDM solutions were sometimes used in place of fiber, they are limited to one wavelength per customer and do not allow for dynamic bandwidth allocation. T-Marc 3348S allows for the connection of different customers with different bandwidth requirements using the same infrastructure, without compromising on the SLAs assured to each customer
Why do you think a customer will buy this product and not that of a competitor?
Routing vs. switching is almost a religious debate – both are valid technologies that can serve the mobile backhaul needs, but each has its pros and cons.
We believe our solution brings several advantages over those routers that will help persuade customers to go with the latter. The first is price-performance ratio – switches provide you with more competitive prices as they require less hardware & computing resources. At the same time, they provide better performance than a router, allowing for lower delay and latency. Over the years, many OAM capabilities have been standardized and are implemented in this product, allowing mobile operators and wholesale providers to better operate, administrate and monitor the SLA they are offering.
In today’s tough economic environment, mobile operators feel the pressure of offering a competitive price. We see more and more operators shift from L3VPN to L2VPNs, and believe that using MPLS for L2VPN is a solution that takes advantage of both worlds, combining a dynamic network with lower latency and delay, and lower operational costs than a full router. We hope that customers will enjoy the benefits that come with our small footprint but high density and sophisticated functionality solution. Our customers can also benefit from our “no licensing” policy, allowing them to extend MPLS to the cell site today or in the future with no additional costs, thus future-proofing their network.
How does this product work as a small cell solution?
In order to save costs, small cells will typically be deployed in a setting of macro cells that have several small cells in it – in high density population locations like malls and parks that will offload the macro cells and allow for higher bandwidths. In order to save costs, we believe that that the service demarcation will be done using a single demarcation device, aggregating the small and the macro cell together. Together, these cells will require more than 1GE backhaul throughput. T-Marc 3348S is the perfect product for this scenario, allowing for 10GE backhaul deployment in a ring and providing high resiliency and availability to this combined cell that serves a large amount of subscribers.
What has been the commercial success of the technology/product so far?
The T-Marc 3348S also offers enterprises 10GE connectivity for heavy-duty cloud applications. The device supports IEEE 802.1q, Q-in-Q, and MPLS transport technologies with no licensing fees, increasing network flexibility and future-proofing the network while reducing technological risks. The T-Marc 3348S provides access to advanced data services such as virtual private wire services (VPWS), virtual private LAN services (VPLS) and hierarchical virtual private LAN services (HVPLS), simplifying the network and making it easier to manage, while gaining the added value that MPLS provides.
As part of the RAN evolution for LTE and LTE Advanced, backhaul networks require strict synchronization of both frequency and phase. T-Marc 3348S provides Synchronous Ethernet (SyncE) and IEEE 1588v2 optimized for the needs of mobile operators and mobile backhaul wholesale providers.
Looking at mobile backhaul markets trends, we can see very clearly that packet-based transport technologies are the preferred choice of most of the market, as they provide the required capacity, with the right carrier grade protection, HQoS flexibility and a major price reduction in comparison to the old TDM-based technologies.
Click here to learn more about T-Marc 3348S 10G Ethernet NID.
About Nir Halachmi
As Product Line Manager, Nir Halachmi is responsible for the design and development of Telco Systems’ mobile backhaul solutions focusing on both cellular and wireless technology as well as QoS, data security and communications. He has spent the past 12 years developing and managing telecommunication products within both the wired and the wireless industry and has worked across various technologies including Carrier Ethernet, circuit emulation, MPLS, IP, Wi-Fi and WiMAX. He has acquired expertise in cellular and wireless technology, QoS, data security and communication field while working with partners and customers to implement various solutions. Nir holds a Master Degree in Computer Science from the Inter-Disciplinary Center (IDC) in Israel.