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Ethernet Virtual Private Line Service (E-Line) In an effort to expand their portfolio and capture the enterprise demand for higher bandwidth services, Service Providers are in the midst of deploying carrier class Ethernet solutions. The addition of point-to-point Ethernet Service offerings will help Service Providers migrate their legacy Private Line, Frame Relay and ATM customers toward a packet-optimized network that will reduce their operational costs and allow them to provision services much faster and with far greater bandwidth flexibility. This is because Ethernet services can be cost-effectively deployed with much higher bandwidth speeds to end-users; they can take advantage of inexpensive CE hardware; and when used with Pseudowire technology, can significantly streamline provisioning and operations.
Service Providers offering point-to-point Ethernet services, or E-Line, have been increasingly able to seamlessly interconnect enterprise customers who are on Local Area Networks into the metro area and onto the core for IP transport, either for Public Internet access or Private IP access. More recently, Service Providers have started to offer Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL) services, which are similar to Ethernet Private Line but allow statistical multiplexing, such that it is far more cost efficient on an operational basis. With the increasing maturity of Pseudowire technology, many Service Providers are utilizing this as the underlying technology to enable a very flexible EVPL service offering. Once they have installed a large Ethernet "pipe" for the enterprise customer, the Service Provider can offer very quick and easy bandwidth upgrades via software provisioning at the NOC rather than requiring truck rolls and multi-month waiting periods. Hammerhead's HSX 6000 is a market-leading Business Ethernet services aggregation platform due to a number of unique capabilities: Extensive MPLS Pseudowire functionality, including Multi-Segment Pseudowires and Pseudowire Switching for better scalability; Hierarchical QoS enables Service Providers to offer multiple classes of service for their EVPL offering, which allows for an optimal matching of the underlying application with service performance, and provides for a better matching of pricing packages to a broader array of service classes; Dense native Ethernet aggregation with Link Aggregation for protection; and Dense Ethernet-over-SONET/SDH aggregation with SONET APS and SDH MSP for protection. With these capabilities, the HSX 6000 is well-positioned for deployments for Carrier Ethernet EVPL services. |
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