| Features |
Earlier approaches like PTA-MD (PPP Termination and Aggregation for Multiple Domain) or
dialup necessitated the user to disconnect from one service to the another service. But not so
with Web based service selection. There is now no need to install client software. Users can be
given personalized services. Internet or corporate access can be made a separate selectable
service. |
| Centralized BRAS based approach was designed for operators that already had an installed
base of ATM switches and wanted to use the same for providing Broadband services. It is
well known that ATM is not the right technology to carry consumer traffic for the access,
especially IP traffic. Moreover the BRASs that were designed were largely for providing comparatively higher speed Internet access and not the highly differentiated IP services like
the ones that the customers expect today. |
Ethernet is clearly winning as the ubiquitous and inexpensive media for carrying IP. However IP
addresses can be easily "spoofed" and MAC addresses keep on changing and are also difficult
to manage. Therefore Carrier grade security usually demands that one VLAN be given per
"billable entity". This approach of using Ethernet in the access favors the distributed BRAS
approach because of 4096 VLAN per Router port limitation in Ethernet. Maintaining one
VLAN per customer also helps to retain the individuality of the customer till the Edge Router
so that advanced services like MPLS VPNs, security filters, Rate Control, Drop precedence
Quality of service treatment and special routing requirements can be rightfully provided. |
| Incumbent carriers have massive investments in copper that they want to leverage against
wireless access by providing broadband services. DSL is seen to be the access technology of
choice here. Almost all current DSLAMs are IP DSLAMs. They terminate ATM over DSL and
handover the Ethernet on an Ethernet (100BaseF or 1000BaseF) port. They also tag a user's
traffic with a VLAN. The traffic might be PPPoE or RBE (Routed Bridge Encapsulation)
encapsulated. Edgile 4G has been designed to take both these encapsulations and handle
appropriately. |
| Greenfield carriers and Cable Operators with fiber based core planning to provide broadband
services, are focusing more on enterprise and MTU/MDU market segment. They take fiber close
the customer and terminate it in an Ethernet switch that in turn delivers the last 100 meters on
CAT-5 cabling. The switch provides either IPoE or preferably IPoVLANoE upstream. Numerous
services might be asked for, on these connections depending on the size, function and organization
of the customer. Edgile 4G has been designed to provide all such services. |
| Edgile 4G comes with an integrated SNMPv2 based management system that can be used to
bring out the full functionality of Edgile 4G very conveniently to the Network Operations Centre.
Intuitively designed Graphical User Interface considerably eases the task of service provisioning,
service management, billing and statistics collection for network enhancement etc. |
Packet/Volume based billing is contentious since the users can not relate to the number of
packets they would have pushed for using a particular service. The customer can better relate to
an itemized bill at the end of month where she gets to know the number of minutes a particular
service was used. This needs sophisticated hardware based accounting. Edgile 4G maintains and
provides SLA (Service Level Agreement) minutes per service per customer so that carrier can bill
the customer amicably and intelligently. "Fine grained QoS" provides bandwidth optimization and
customer satisfaction Unlike traditional BRASs that were primarily designed for higher speed
Internet access, Edgile 4G has been designed for delivering superior edge services like VPNs, VoIP,
Video multicast, Video conferencing and gaming. These applications need a wide variety of QoS
elements to function in a way that will make the customer pay up. Edgile 4G provides the fine
grained QoS capabilities that such services expect from the Edge Router. |
| Loading sophisticated conferencing software into customer's computers is an expensive and yet
inadequate proposition for the carrier. This is because the new installation invariably leads to some
compatibility issues with the applications already installed on the customer's machine. This leads
to a lot of calls to the customer care. Microsoft NetMeeting however is usually already loaded as a
part of Windows and the probability of incompatibility is minimal. Edgile 4G therefore provides QoS
over WAN links to H.323 based software. This minimizes the calls made to the carrier call centre.
Most users can have an immediate video conferencing experience since they arealready familiar
with NetMeeting. |
| Edgile 4G allows the network to dynamically (using MPLS RSVP-TE) check the availability of
bandwidth before allowing a connection to be made. This ensures that the existing connections of
consumers do not suffer quality deterioration when a new connection is made. This was not
possible earlier where a premium customer packet would always take precedence over a general
customer packet and spoil movie/music experience. |
| Corporations or even Small/Medium Sized Enterprises paying/are willing to pay large amount
of money to get stable, high speed Internet access. Especially IT enabled service companies or
knowledge based research firms incur huge losses due to Internet access down time. Edgile 4G
has features where it can be deployed in clusters (of two or more) with required protocols working
between them to ensure that failure of one does not disrupt any service. |
| Edgile 4G has been designed as a monolithic PCB but keeping in mind that redundancy would be
required at some locations in a carrier grade network. This way the carrier can choose to upgrade
some time after the first installation. Single PCB based system saves the costs in backplane,
connectors, multiple PCBs, management processor and also large chassis and cooling. It also
improves hardware reliability and software stability. |
| Edgile 4G software has been designed keeping in mind the learning from design of large telephony
switch software. The software allows Hitless software upgrades and high availability operation.
The architecture has separate processes that handle routing, management and forwarding. In
case where protection is achieved using two Edgiles connected back to back, there is an option to
run the processes for system management and routing/switching protocols run on both Edgiles.
State is maintained between the primary and secondary processors (auto-designated). The
secondary processor takes over the operation if the primary fails. Since the forwarding tables wit
link management functions are on separate processors, this failover is transparent to packet
forwarding or link management. Each process uses multiple threads to prioritize tasks. There are
supervisory tasks that keep monitoring the health of other tasks and in case of a watch dog timer
running out, can kill and re-spawn the tasks with the right state. |
| In the ever changing Telecom Carrier world (and especially in the edge/access where one
directly deals with the end customer) the requirements keep adding. There are new protocols, new
constraints, new ALGs (Application Level Gateways) that keep coming up in this part of the network.
Edgile 4G uses Network processors to provide the right performance that is required at this network
location and simultaneously adapt to newer packet/protocol processing. |
| Edgile 4G provides protection to end customers by filtering unwanted access made to the customer's
PC or Network Computing Resources. Explicit commands can be given to allow a particular traffic. All
traffic that is not explicitly allowed to pass through it filtered out. |
| Video Multicast is another lucrative service that the Network Service Provider can charge its
customers. Edgile4G supports IGMPv2 and PIM-SM for multicast routing. |
| Scarcity of IPv4 addresses are a major concern for NSPs. Edgile 4G provisions for various types of
NAT on customer packets for Address Conservation. The customers can get a fixed IP address
(where they can run web servers or ftp servers), a dynamic IP address or an overloaded NAT IP
address. |
| Most residential customers would get their IP addresses behind the Edgile NAT. Since these IP
addresses would not be available to somebody on the Internet, it provides security attacks that
need the IP address to be known. It provides one additional level of security. |
