These developments have yielded
substantial increases in data traffic volumes and forced carriers to look for improved
services scalability and lower costs??”both capital and operational. Consider some details
briefly.
The residential sector has seen the adoption of many ???last-mile??? broadband access solutions
with multimegabit speeds. For example, most cable operators have aggressively
deployed high-speed data-over-cable solutions and migrated their infrastructures to
highly scalable hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) setups. Meanwhile, competing incumbents have
rolled out various DSL schemes to deliver improved data (and some video) services.
Furthermore, many incumbents are even starting to deploy fiber-based Passive Optical
Networks (PON), raising the bar to genuine gigabit-level scalability. Concurrently, various
high-speed wireless technologies are maturing rapidly, including WiMAX (IEEE
802.16). All of these build-outs have shown a strong unifying trend toward low-cost
packet-based delivery and bundled triple-play services, for example, voice, video, and
data. These changes have propelled IP/Ethernet data volumes well beyond legacy voice
levels, generating large back-haul requirements.
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