RAD's Metro Ethernet Demarcation Product Line Enhanced for Carrier Ethernet Access and WiMAX/LTE Backhaul

April 11, 2008: RAD Data Communications, a leading provider of Carrier Ethernet and pseudowire access solutions for telecom, cable and mobile operators, has announced that it is launching its ETX-A series of intelligent demarcation units, designed to support managed Carrier Ethernet services and backhaul WiMAX/LTE traffic. The first product in the series, the ETX-202A, will be introduced at the upcoming Backhaul Strategies for Mobile Operators conference to be held in Atlanta, Georgia in early May.

"The ETX-202A provides key functions at customer premises, multi-tenant units (MTUs), remote cell sites as well as aggregating hubs," says Eitan Schwartz, Vice President of Carrier Ethernet and Pseudowire at RAD Data communications, Inc. At both the customer premises and remote cell sites there is a requirement for robust bandwidth control mechanisms to classify, police, schedule, and shape high-priority traffic to ensure that it is not delayed or discarded even when the link is congested. At MTUs or WiMAX/LTE hub sites, the ETX-202A aggregates traffic from multiple customers or cell sites and ensures fair distribution of bandwidth in accordance with the carrier’s policies. Intelligent traffic engineering, including a WRED policy, ensures that queues are not congested and high priority traffic is not dropped, even when links are oversubscribed.

RAD's ETX-202A builds on the success of its popular EPL (Ethernet private line) port-based ETX Metro Ethernet demarcation product line, but adds support for EVPL (Ethernet virtual private line) and flow based services with flexible mapping of the user traffic into Ethernet flows. It is a carrier class solution with redundant power supply and environmentally hardened options. In addition, the ETX-202A features end-to-end OAM based on IEEE 802.1ag and ITU T Y.1731, enabling mobile operators and Ethernet service providers to monitor their services proactively, measure end-to-end performance and ensure they receive the contracted SLA. Fault monitoring and performance measurement include frame delay, frame delay variation, frame loss, and availability. In addition, the ETX-202A can test end-to-end Layer-2 link integrity with the help of wire-speed MAC swap loopbacks, so that the ETX exchanges source and destination MAC addresses of the incoming packets. This loopback can be performed per port, per VLAN or per flow. It passes through Ethernet bridges and does not disrupt traffic flows, which are not being tested.

RAD's ETX-202A is MEF-9 and MEF-14 EPL and EVPL certified.