Optical network foundation for triple play services roll-out

Telecom carriers worldwide are engaged in the IP transformation of their legacy network infrastructure for consolidation and to enable the wide deployment of new triple play high-speed services (e.g. IPTV, VOD, VoIP). One of the challenges facing carriers is that triple play enabled networks are fundamentally different from their predecessors. They need to carry a multitude of high-bandwidth services over a single network, and unlike traditional point-to-point connections, triple play networks are much more distributed, multi-point, and broader in scope. For these reasons, new IP/MPLS infrastructures to address triple play roll-outs is not enough - carriers need to make sure that they also have the right agile optical transport foundation in place to support these new dynamic high-bandwidth services. This paper explores the demands and requirements that triple play broadband services are placing on the optical metro infrastructure. It also presents the key networking attributes of the underlining optical metro/regional network (e.g. ROADM) required to deal with the unprecedented triple play broadband demands.