Northwest Open Access Network Oregon (NoaNet Oregon) is deploying Riverstone’s family of RS routers to bring video on demand, IP telephony and other advanced services to rural communities in Oregon.

NoaNet Oregon interconnects schools, hospitals, judicial systems, libraries and emergency services. NoaNet Oregon’s members and wholesale customers operate communication systems within their own service areas, connecting to the NoaNet Oregon backbone to provide Internet access, data services and access to the Public Switched Telephone Network.

Riverstone’s RS 8000 and 8600 routers more efficiently groom and shape traffic, guaranteeing multiple levels of service to its wholesale, utility and rural customers while Riverstone’s rate limiting technology enables NoaNet to more effectively provision bandwidth.

NoaNet Oregon is a private nonprofit cooperative affiliated with the publicly-owned NoaNet Washington. Together they operate a regional transport network of over 2,400 miles of fiber optic cable in the Pacific Northwest, leased primarily from the Bonneville Power Administration. The overall NoaNet network is being built with the future of the converging telecommunications for rural communities.

Other municipalities are developing their own networks. CommunityFiber.blogspot keeps tabs on new regional & community networks.

• In Oakland, Mich., an upscale suburb of Detroit, the county built a network and is providing free Internet service to its 61 government entities. Last year, Virginia passed a law allowing its municipalities to enter the telecom business similar to the way Utah is doing it.

• Chicago’s non-profit fiber net is being attacked with “take no prisoners” campaigns launched by cable and phone companies.

• A new community in Issaquah, Washington has a wired LAN in every home, free community Intranet, and a choice for a fiber optic connection.

• FTTH, a Minneapolis area Integrated Communications Provider, developed and operates a fiber-to-the-home network in three master planned communities with voice, video and data. FTTH uses Myrio to provide the video solution and will make it available to over 2,600 homes.

• The Utah UTOPIA project is currently, the largest FTTH and FTTB project in the world. It is a unique partnership between municipal governments and the private sector in Utah to construct a fiber infrastructure all around the state.

So far 18 Utah cities, excluding Salt Lake City, are involved in the Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency (UTOPIA), which will eventually provide $400 million worth of high-speed fiber-optic connectivity among its member cities.

Once the network is complete, the agency plans to open up the network to private companies, encouraging competition among phone, television, cable and internet providers by wholesaling access to the network. You can read more about Utopia at FCW.com, The Salt Lake Tribune, or the project’s website.

Communities are using regional fiber backbones in a variety of ways:

The Benton Public Utility District (P.U.D.), based in Kennewick, Wash., is installing an outdoor fiber-to-wireless system. The Seattle PI reports, it allows users of laptops or Tablet PCs to roam securely while using fiber for the backbone. Chameleon Technology provided the wireless interface to the Bonneville fiber.

Charter Communications’ Kennewick, Wash. system illustrates the benefits of deploying GigE transport technology.

The master headend is located in Kennewick and includes two primary hubs in Yakima and Walla Walla. nCUBE and Foundry Networks equipment (right) are used in the master headend. The digital cable infrastructure includes:

• Cable viewers use Motorola’s DCT-2000 set top box for VOD
• An OM-1000 Modulators and RPD-2000 Return Path Demodulators are distributed at all three sites
• A NC-1500 Network Controller is located in Kennewick
• A DAC-6000 digital controller is located 200 miles away, in Vancouver, Wash.

TV Guide Interactive provides the program guide client, which is integrated with nCUBE’s On Demand Application (nODA) client software to support VOD on the Motorola’s DCT-2000 set top box.

The nCUBE VOD system uses standard HTTP, RTSP and XML formats and is located at a central facility at the Kennewick master headend.

Billing and provisioning is handled by a contractor. TVN, the leading provider of on-demand content, management and delivery services, provides PPV satellite delivered content like “Event TV“, a 24 hour Pay-Per-View (PPV) network with events like WWE wrestling, major boxing events from HBO PPV and Showtime Event Television. The satellite feed goes into a docking station in the Kennewick master headend. CableLabs specifications are used for transport of data.

How does it work?

• With GigE, it is standard practice to provision 900 Mbps of MPEG-2 Transport Stream payload over a link. At a transport stream bit rate of 3.75 Mbps, 900 Mbps equates to 240 streams.
• Up to 40 wavelengths can be multiplexed via DWDM onto a fiber, yielding a single fiber transport capacity of 80 GigE links.
• The nCube video server interfaces via bi-directional GigE link to the DWDM interfacing gear. tAn economical 1000base-TX copper interface to connects the video server to the switch, and the switch interfaces optically to the DWDM gear.
• The Foundry BigIron switch GigE ports feeds clusters in Kennewick, Yakima and Walla Walla.

The Grant County IPTV network (above) delivers an IPTV solution for Grant County. It uses 40, Minerva MPEG-2 IP encoders and 60 digital video broadcasting (DVB)-to-IP demultiplexers to feed the Zipp network. This equipment creates a fully redundant IP television headend for access to more than 200 channels of live television and on-demand programming.

Other equipment includes IP video servers for the delivery of VoD and pause/rewind capability, Ethernet-based set-top boxes, IP multicast-enabled network equipment, and dedicated bandwidths exceeding 5 Mbits/ sec to each home.

Grant County’s PUD is installing fiber along its existing power lines and then creating community hubs that each can service up to 280 homes or businesses. The PUD installs fiber directly to the home or business from its SONET network. The Zipp Network provides access to Internet Protocol (IP) telephone, digital video and high-speed Internet from a variety of ISPs.

“Customer premises equipment, such as fiber network termination gear and IP-based set-top boxes, were very expensive,” says Reed Majors, vice president of business development at Minerva. “Over the last 18 months, set-top-box prices have dropped dramatically and should continue to do so until they reach the $200 range. Likewise, 18 months ago, the FTTH residential gateways were priced in the $2,000-per-home range - today, they are closer to $1,500, and in another year, we should see prices in the $600 range.”

Grant County, which serves Spokane, Washington, has high tech roots. The region is home to World Wide Packets and is the birthplace of Vivato.

Cisco’s new Catalyst 6500 switches combine Power Over Ethernet with GigE connectivity. The upgrade also includes beefed up wireless capabilites to support a growing number of devices and services such as Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Network Address Translation (NAT).

That could be handy for pole-mounted Vivato outdoor Wi-Fi switches.

C/Net explains;

Switches are at the core of any digital network, from the Internet itself to an office phone system. Switches and routers work in tandem to ferry digital information from one place to the next. For instance, a phone call to an office usually first encounters a router, which attaches instructions to direct it to the right place. The switch finishes the job.

Using IP to transport everything is gaining popularity. SONET’s ring architecture is expensive, while gigabit Ethernet lacks redundancy and QOS. Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS & FAQ) uses label based switching. Routers forward packets based on the contents of a simple label, rather than by performing a complex route lookup based on destination IP address.

Resilient Packet Ring (RPR Alliance) ring technology takes it one step further by creating a redundant ring (like SONET) while keeping the simplicity of IP networks. It’s being standardized by the IEEE 802.17 working group and provides full quality-of-service functions and rapid equipment failure recovery. It may provide inexpensive, fast 100Mbps to the home with audio and video over IP. Only hubs that require a multicast service need to bother with the overhead and only a single copy of the traffic need be transported around the ring.

Riverstone’s Resilient Packet Ring Packet Ring could run rings around Portland. The Riverstone RS product family combines DOCSIS 1.1 cable modems with MPLS, packet ring, routing and legacy WAN interfaces in a single high-performance chassis. Riverstone’s Metro Routers may deliver carrier-class reliability with Resilient Packet Ring for 1/10th the cost of traditional ATM or Sonet favored by legacy carriers.

A single Internet protocol (IP) backbone can carry increasingly heavy traffic loads across cable or fiber plants. Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) may be the enabling technology.

“As far as municipal involvement in this, the genie is out of the bottle in my opinion,” says Paul Morris, UTOPIA’s executive director

Posted by Sam Churchill on Monday, March 31st, 2003 at 12:57 am.