That is Half II of a three-blog collection on options to beat challenges related to bridging the digital divide.
Within the earlier weblog (see Bridging the Digital Divide with Subscriber Edge), we mentioned the standard broadband community design. On this weblog, we’ll give attention to a brand new structure for broadband networks, and the challenges that they handle.
Transferring to a distributed structure
The power to allow subscriber features on completely different layers or gadgets within the community supplies a chance to optimally place subscriber edge within the community to assist match economical and user-experience wants. For instance, provided that video quantities to greater than 75% of the quantity of whole subscriber site visitors, versatile termination permits for the environment friendly offload of video site visitors nearer to the subscriber by way of cautious placement of content material caches and the addition of peering factors. Distributed termination of subscribers improves the general consumer expertise because the site visitors follows a extra splendid path that optimizes capability utilization and helps decrease latency for demanding purposes.
With this distributed structure, communication service suppliers (CSPs) can save prices by lowering unneeded bandwidth upgrades of the complete community by way of site visitors offload additional downstream. Nonetheless, with extra distributed placement of subscriber edge features utilizing completely different termination fashions, CSPs might face challenges with scaling, managing, and working subscriber providers networks.
To unravel these challenges, Broadband Discussion board outlined the Management and Person Airplane Separation (CUPS) mannequin for the Broadband Community Gateway (BNG) in TR-459 (see Determine 1). CUPS permits distribution of consumer/knowledge planes nearer to the subscriber, permitting the management airplane perform to be centralized. This can be a important change from the standard BNG structure—the place management airplane and consumer airplane features are tightly built-in and carried out by the identical gadget. This new distributed architectural method takes benefit of CUPS to supply newer broadband providers and use circumstances which might be completely different from conventional choices.
Centralizing the management airplane perform helps decrease operational prices in a distributed subscriber edge perform that may be non-uniform with various necessities on scalability, type issue, and position.
CUPS additionally permits new income streams or fashions, which weren’t potential with the standard structure, akin to differentiated service plans. For instance, service suppliers can supply a day/evening plan, the place subscribers are provisioned or moved to a smaller set of consumer planes throughout the evening for price financial savings and potential sustainability advantages.
Prospects can even supply tiered plans with Platinum, Gold, and Greatest-Effort, based mostly on redundancy capabilities to assist shield premium subscribers from consumer airplane, entry, or web site failures. With the management airplane now not tightly built-in with the consumer airplane, and full visibility of all consumer planes, CUPS permits increased flexibility for CSPs to seamlessly transfer subscribers to completely different nodes with out disruption.
The newest improvement by the Broadband Discussion board is Concern 2 of TR-459 Multi-Service Disaggregated BNG with CUPS specification (see Figure2), which permits improved resiliency, scalability, and sooner deployment occasions to assist present a greater end-user expertise with a extra dependable and constant service.
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Within the third weblog, we’ll share particulars on the Cisco Subscriber Edge resolution, together with the structure, technical benefits, and buyer advantages.
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