General

Fun with Big Pipes — continued

The other complication: Belgacom's backbone network is SONET-based. The simplest solution would have been to rip out the old and replace it with a 10 Gbps Ethernet system, but that would have been prohibitively expensive.

Protocol mismatches are not an uncommon problem in the transport realm. The solution with most systems is to carry other protocols on top of SONET (or whatever is the network's native protocol). Belgacom could have done it this way, using gear from its original transport equipment supplier. But the network interface costs would have been about double what they would be if the stadium links were passing data to the backbone in native SONET, Adams explains.

It was these technical complications that made Ekinops not just the best choice for the Belgacom project, he contends, but in the end the only choice. Ekinops was the sole vendor to be able to meet all the requirements.

Protocols
The company's dynaMux technology makes it possible to multiplex different protocols into one stream—including, in this case, putting uncompressed HD video in a 10 gigabit Ethernet stream, something few if any other vendors could do. "Most say they'll put it on two wavelengths, but we can [multiplex] both in a single wavelength," he explains.

And Ekinops' programmable T-chip technology gives it flexibility for mixing and matching protocols. It was able in effect to take a 10 gigabit Ethernet stream from the stadiums and pass it to the legacy backbone as native SONET protocol, eliminating the costly business of carrying Ethernet on top of SONET.

"We can handle many protocols and carry them any way you want," Adams says. "We can even upgrade systems in the field. Say you originally put it in the field to only handle SONET. We can reprogram later to do Ethernet."

Few other vendors could have met Belgacom's time lines either, he says. Ekinops did have to custom develop the solution to some extent.

"It's very difficult to do something like this in four months," Adams says. "If you went to Cisco and said, 'Give me [a similar custom solution],' it would probably take them a year and a half. It would be the same with most transport equipment vendors. But with our programmable technology, we were able to do it much faster."

While it's by no means universally applicable in transport networks, the solution SEE and Ekinops came up with—partly based on fairly new technology from Ekinops—does have other applications.

Belgacom will likely use it to connect other sporting venues. "They're considering equipping more stadiums in other locations for other sports, and they're looking at expanding the number of services," Van Hoecke says. As the switch to HD continues, he adds, the Belgacom solution could be used anywhere SD video is currently carried over transport networks.

The crucial ability to transport multiple streams of uncompressed HD video as Ethernet is something that will mainly be of interest to two types of end users, Adams says. One is companies like Belgacom that need to link event facilities for remote broadcasts, the other is video production and post-production companies that need to be able to quickly move high-quality video from the point of production to a facility for editing, color correction and other processing.

That means carriers and service providers that offer managed network services to those kinds of companies should be interested—and are, he says. Ekinops has trials underway with a few companies, but is not allowed to say who they are.

Even smaller service providers should be interested. "It's the same cost level as for other 10 gigabit Ethernet transport technology," Adams says. "So it's something smaller carriers can afford and it would be nice for them to be able to use it to differentiate themselves against bigger competitors." But no smaller player is actually trialing the technology yet.

In the longer term, there is another intriguing application—distributing very high-quality video to film theaters. There has long been a vision of film theaters in the future using super high-quality video, transmitted over a network, instead of film on spools. It would eliminate the expense and distribution constraints associated with producing and transporting multiple prints of a film.

"But that is still a ways away," Adams admit.

The take-away for the average internet professional? Expect bandwidth and protocol constraints on transport networks to fade away. Now think about what that could do to the economics of rich media on the internet!

—End

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