Hitachi EPON equipment used in growth of mobile backhaul and business services

SANTA CLARA, USA: Hitachi Communication Technologies America Inc. (HCTA), the only vendor offering a comprehensive line of EPON, GPON, DePON™, MW-PON™, and RFoG equipment announced that its EPON solutions are supporting the growth of mobile backhaul and business services.

Recent successes in delivering service for mobile backhaul are driving the use of EPON in service provider networks. The industry is increasing the use of fiber technologies to access cell towers and business customers.

PON technologies were created to make efficient use of fiber and recent deployments of Hitachi'’s EPON for mobile backhaul have proven their value in cellular networks. This trend will continue along with the need for bandwidth and cell tower density.

“Our experience demonstrates that using EPON for fiber access to cell towers will deliver the quality, bandwidth, and redundancy required for this rapidly growing application,” said Jeffrey Stribling, VP of PLM and Customer Service for HCTA. He added, “Over the past two years our EPON solutions have supported the growth of wireless offerings for service providers in key U.S. markets.”

According to recent data provided to the Metro Ethernet Forum by Infonetics Research, Inc., the business case for Ethernet in Mobile Backhaul applications is strong. A combination of: 1) increasing bandwidth needs, 2) strong mobile subscriber growth, 3) cost advantages over PDH connectivity, and 4) the availability of Ethernet interfaces on new base stations, makes EPON a serious contender for mobile backhaul applications.

The Hitachi EPON solution leverages the benefits of mobile backhaul and business services on the same EPON network. Both applications require similar features. Hitachi’s EPON equipment supports ITU-T Y.1731 service management, which focuses on end-to-end service performance. Critical features for voice traffic support provided by Y.1731 include frame delay, delay variation and frame loss measurements as well as monitoring and test capabilities for SLA verification.

New features in the Hitachi EPON system enable up to 40 percent latency reduction compared to standard EPON. This capability was developed to support voice applications. The Hitachi EPON equipment is also MEF 9 and MEF 14 certified to insure network performance and interoperability among heterogeneous equipment.

Voice quality is another area where Hitachi EPON has proven successful. 3G and 4G mobile networks have significant buffering capabilities designed into the wireless equipment. However, 2.5G systems, by far the most numerous today, have no buffering and can tolerate approximately 8ms of one-way delay.

Of this budget, approximately .5ms is introduced by the EPON equipment. An additional 1.5ms is used for TDM-to-Ethernet conversion, leaving 6ms for the rest of the IP network. This EPON performance has proven to be just as reliable as T-1 PDH networks in transporting high quality voice traffic.

Resilience is another innovation in the Hitachi system. Path redundancy can be achieved using diversely routed fiber. When there are two fiber paths to the cell tower Hitachi’s solution can provide “hitless” redundancy. Using Hitachi EPON in this configuration, with Circuit Emulation Services, there is no data loss or delay when switching from the primary to the secondary path. This feature is important in supporting strict SLAs.

“We know that Ethernet access is replacing T-1 access for SMB and Enterprise customers and believe that this situation will be replicated as Ethernet becomes common for mobile backhaul connectivity.” Stribling continued, “Our EPON systems have the advanced software features that enable mobile backhaul and other new Ethernet applications.”