Leveraging SDH Infrastructure to Deliver Ethernet Services

Demand for Ethernet services is growing and established carriers are struggling to decide what the most cost effective architecture to deliver these services is. In many cases, the demand for these new Ethernet services is still relatively low compared to demand for private line services and doesn´t justify the expense of building a separate transport network to carry these services. Moreover, established carriers have built high capacity Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) networks in the past decade and a significant part of this capacity is still unused today. For these reasons, some carriers are looking today at delivering Ethernet services over their existing SDH infrastructure. This work describes a study to use the existing SDH infrastructure in Lebanon to offer Ethernet services to Data and Internet Service Providers (DSPs and ISPs), dedicated for transport of broadband Internet traffic. The study focuses on the service scenarios to interconnect Internet users, DSPs and ISPs, without compromising security, performance and management simplicity. A design is proposed to fulfill the requirements of DSPs/ISPs. The proposed design is currently in the process of implementation and testing.