High-tech renaissance

After a meltdown around the time of the new millennium, Israel’s high-tech industry today is coming back to life. Thanks in part to sizeable injections of state funding, information and communication tech startups numbered more than 2,000 at the start of this year – in a country with a population of just 6.9 million. With 1 million broadband connections, Israel has a penetration of 43%, the second-highest in the world after South Korea and far higher than in Germany. And ranked on the number scientists and engineers in the workforce, Israel has an unassailable lead with 140 for every 10,000 employees, compared to 83 in the U.S., 80 in Japan, and 60 in Germany.

To appreciate the high innovation potential in Israeli companies, all you need to do is pay a visit to one of the country’s makers of telecommunication equipment.

One shining example is the RAD Group. In 1981, Zohar Zisapel and his brother Yehuda formed RAD Data Communications. Today, the RAD Group has more than 3,000 employees in 15 companies and net annual sales of US$600 million. Zohar Zisapel attributes the successes scored over the long term to the creation of a string of independently managed startups in the years since the original company was founded.

Zisapel believes that a new company has to do two things to be a success: implement a strong idea, and hire skilled and talented people. True to this principle, the Group set up two more new companies last year, the first in four years:

- Radlive, which focuses on developing hi-fi telephony. The goals lie in improving voice quality and communication between subscribers – in contrast to VoIP and mobile telephony.

- Commex Technologies Inc., which is developing a chip to accelerate IP communication.

When asked by journalists to explain the secret to growing his group of companies, Zisapel names three factors: turning innovations into new products, concentrating on customers’ specific needs, and manufacturing products to the highest possible quality standards. This insistence on quality earned the Group the Yitzhak Rabin National Quality Award in 2000, and Israel’s Association of Electronics and Information Industries has since honored RAD with its annual award for quality and exceptional business performance. The high quality of the products is sustained by continuing to handle all of the manufacturing – from board production to product assembly, testing and quality control – in its own plant in Jerusalem. And each year, the Group’s companies invest between 20 and 30 percent of sales in research and development.

At this year’s CeBIT, RAD is exhibiting new OAM-ready (Operation, Administration and Maintenance) Carrier Ethernet products – ETX network termination units for managed Ethernet services with guaranteed service levels and low operating costs. The ETX units are the first equipment anywhere in the world to implement the emerging ITU Y.17ETHOAM and IEEE 802.1ag standards. These enable carriers and service providers to manage services like IP-VPN inexpensively and to guarantee quality of service on the entire network – a crucial step along the road to making Ethernet a carrier-class technology. Because service providers operate their own termination equipment on customer premises, they can guarantee reliable service delivery at the official interchange point, and this intelligent demarcation has been incorporated into the ETX series of carrier-class E-NTUs. In addition, RAD is showing a comprehensive portfolio of products supporting the transition to packet-switched mobile access networks for mobile and transport network operators. The backhaul-over-packet portfolio encompasses DSL modems, Integrated Access Devices (IAD) to complement IP-DSLAMs, gateways for emulating conventional line-based services (pseudowire), and equipment for aggregating ATM traffic. Says Gaby Junowicz, Director of Business Development for Cellular Networks at RAD: “Now that fixed-line operators are increasingly deploying infrastructures for packet-switched voice and data transmission, mobile operators are looking for solutions that will enable them to profit from the affordable cost structure of IP, Ethernet and MPLS. With the transport of data traffic from the base station all the way to the backbone network, they can achieve significant cost savings.”

The new Vmux-420 and Vmux-2100 gateways are based on RAD’s patented TDM over IP (TDMoIP) pseudowire technology and have numerous features that can bring down operating costs. The Vmux-420 is a standalone optimization gateway for traffic between BTS and BSC (A-bis) and between BSC and MSC (A-ter). It enables mobile network operators to increase bandwidth threefold while at the same time reducing the requisite number of E1 connections by half. The gateway can be deployed in terrestrial, satellite and microwave environments using TDM or IP/MPLS-based transport. RAD is especially proud of its solution for precise clock regeneration, a particularly difficult problem in packet-switched networks. Packet-switched infrastructures with statistical methods do not use central clocking; this prompted RAD to develop ASICs that have a low latency and need a jitter buffer of just 0.5ms.

One of RAD’s reference customers is U.S. network operator Time Warner Cable, a name they like to mention. In Houston, Texas, the company operates a metro Ethernet that uses RAD’s IPmux gateways to emulate T1 and T3 lines on packet-switched networks.

The new MiRIC family of products – a reminder of RAD’s past successes with miniature modems the size of a connector – is a series of miniature bridges in SFP (Small Form-factor Pluggable) packages that allow Fast Ethernet to be connected directly to structured and unstructured E1 and E3 interfaces. The bridges, which are no larger than a connector, can be plugged into a 100Base FX port with a compatible SFP socket. This can be done during live operation. The power is drawn from the host equipment (e.g., a switch or router). Typical uses for the MiRIC products are to provide transparent LAN services on standard E1 and E3 lines and to connect satellite offices on wired or wireless (microware) connections. The bridges operate at wire speed, support duplex flow control, 64-2016-byte Ethernet frames, and VLAN tagging, and feature a number of status and monitoring management functions.