Controlling E3/T3 Services over Incumbent Carrier’s Infrastructure

In today's open communications market, many alternative carriers and service providers are competing head to head with incumbent carriers for high speed data services customers. Since most new service providers have limited access networks, they use the incumbent carrier's infrastructure, which is made available to them according to government regulation in many countries. This situation makes it difficult for new carriers to ensure the quality of their service end-to-end across the entire network because the traffic is traversing another carrier's access segment. For this reason, alternative service providers are looking for access equipment to overcome this problem and enable them to run diagnostics and performance monitoring up to the customer premises.

RAD's solution is the PRBi-E3 and PRBi-T3. These intelligent, customer-located network termination units were developed at the request of leading international carriers, for termination of E3/T3 services. The equipment detects and isolates network faults end-to-end, based on realtime alarm indication and loopback activation/deactivation. This solution, therefore, enables service providers to ensure Quality of Service across the network, up to the customer premises. The PRBi-E3 and PRBi-T3 devices alert the RADview application via dial-up modem if a fault is detected. For fault isolation, the device automatically detects a pattern in the E3 or T3 header coming from the network port for in-band indication to activate/deactivate a diagnostic loopback. The RADview standard SNMP application, running on the HP OpenView UNIX or PC platform, provides a user-friendly interface for monitoring and configuring a remote PRBi-E3 or PRBi-T3 unit. The loops can also be activated/deactivated out-of-band using the dial-up modems.