VoIP equipment manufacturer General Bandwidth has implemented PseudoWire Emulation End-to-End (PWE3), an emerging standard, in its G6 Universal Media Gateway so carriers can migrate legacy services onto new video and data packet networks.
"Moving to a single, unified access network is now a reachable goal," says Charles Vogt, president and CEO of General Bandwidth. "No service provider wants to be burdened by the costs of operating two vastly different networks, and we have developed a universal, cost-effective solution to ensure that legacy services can easily be transported over these new access networks and connected to either their legacy or next-generation destinations."
Instead of requiring carriers to use two different access networks – TDM and IP – PWE3 provides another access packetization option that, according to General Bandwidth, has inherent advantages over VoIP. As a new standard supported by the Metro Ethernet Forum and IETF, PWE3 enables legacy service transport over Ethernet, IP and MPLS networks, including support for both TDM-based voice and point-to-point data services. PWE3 does not require protocol conversions and packetizes the TDM information so it can be transported through the packet access network while remaining unchanged at either destination.
Digital loop carriers and business services like T1 and PRI make up a large part of the TDM access network, and these services easily can be transported over the IPTV packet network via PWE3, according to General Bandwidth. The company’s G6 platform serves as the central office or headend aggregation point and terminates these PWE3 TDM services into Class 5 switches or routers. However, when a customer eventually subscribes to new VoIP services, the G6 platform allows it to convert the TDM voice traffic to VoIP for control by softswitches or SIP application servers.
