Microwave Links
Microwave Products available from SIAE UK
SIAE GP can provide the widest range of microwave solutions from within the company's own manufacturing plant in Milan. SIAE, with a Research and Development team of some 200 engineers has one of the best design capabilities in the world and is renowned for their ability to listen to their customers and produce unique features as required.
Not only has SIAE already designed, developed and sold conventional PDH and SDH products in their hundreds of thousands, but the company has now brought to market a range of niche products which will provide opportunities to access new markets on the one hand, but to achieve costs savings on the other.
At the top end of the bandwidth market and most suitable for deplyment in trunk backbones lies the ALS range of 4 x STM1, STM4, and Gigabit products.
This unit is incredibly flexible and is shown in East-West configuration - one single unit connected to an incoming and outgoing 2 x STM1 link via two antennae units, each with separate Ooutdoor Units mounted at the rear.
In the middle of the range lies the extremely flexible and capable AL range which can provide from 1 x E1 up to 48 x E1, or alternative traffic presentation schemes which include over 100Mbps of true Ethernet throughput in a PDH radio.
The product is not only highly spectrally efficient, but can also be configured in protected mode through a single antenna, or provided with double the standard capacity through a single antenna.
The diagram shows operation of a single unit feeding two antennae in East-West configuration. This demonstrates another valuable feature - the ability in a TDM network of dropping out or adding in E1 traffic via the in-built hitless switch.
Of particuar interest to the Carrier market is the range of mixed TDM and Ethernet products. The AL range for example can be flexibly configured between the extremes of 48 x E1 through to an IP throughout of 105Mbps across 3 x 10/100Mbps Ethernet connections in various mixes that will enable th flexible delivery of conventional TDM traffic whilst also carrying a growing level of IP traffic.
On a highly topical note, and of particular interest to those with a requirement for secure and stable last mile access - such as Telcos, Internet Service Providers, System Integrators and the Public Sector - the company is just launching a new product which will drop the cost point of a fully licensed product to compete with de-restricted lightly licensed products.
This new product is known as the AL Full Outdoor (ALFO) and combines the company's reputation for technical innovation with their hard-won global capability for cost-effective manufacture whilst retaining the SIAE brand reputation for quality and reliability. (Interesting to note that from our experience across the high numbers of AL product sold over the last two years, we can only recollect one failure - and surprisingly that was not the item installed at 4km above sea level and operating at -65C for the last two years - see Home page for picture).
The Compact Range - ALc
The ALc contains the features of the AL in a cost-reduced format and offers a lower cost route to access the big ticket features for customers who don't need to retain the full breadth of future upgrade potential built into the main AL unit.
A frequency independent Indoor Unit which is both locally and remotely programmable in modulation and capacity and offers the highly usable traffic ranges of up to 16 x E1 - PLUS - 3 x 10/100BaseT connections together with an integrated Layer 2 switch.
The Outdoor Units support a range of modulation schemes allowing traffic throughput to be set in the range from 4 to 68Mbps.
Ethernet Over SDH
When you look in depth at today's communications landscape you will see that the Ethernet LAN serves our internal networks while Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) or Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) serves carrier and service provider networks.
For inter-site communication, end users relied on Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) or Packet over SONET or Frame Relay technologies.This was because SONET and SDH channel sizes were defined to support legacy TDM based DS1, DS3, E1, E2 signals and Ethernet was not directly supported.All of this meant that there was additional equipment and network management adding to the cost and complexity.
The scene is now changing and carriers need to transport and deliver broadband Ethernet services. Thanks to a range of technologies it is now possible for SONET and SDH based networks to efficiently transport slices of Ethernet traffic and IP services to various customers.
Such technologies include:-
- Virtual Concatenation – this solves bandwidth mismatch problems by combining several VC12 or VC3 to create a high bandwidth link between two sites on a SDH network
- Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme - the LCAS-protocol is used for adding or removing bandwidth seamlessly without affecting traffic
- Generic Framing Procedure – the GFP method is used to encapsulate and transport data like variable Ethernet MAC frames over SDH networks.
Carriers possessing a network infrastructure of voice-optimized SDH networks can now implement Ethernet over SDH (EoS). This translates into numerous benefits for carriers and their subscribers.
Subscribers can now be offered bandwidth on demand, provision data rates as per end user requirements; offer carrier infrastructure associated reliability (thanks to inherent fault recovery mechanism, dynamic load balancing, and dynamic route optimization) and provide broad service area coverage.
In addition, they can also be offered new services like private Ethernet leased line or virtual private Ethernet leased line connectivity between end user sites, point to point or multipoint through the currently deployed SDH network.
Contact SIAE UK
If you are considering replacing, modernising, or building new network infrastructure, we strongly reommend an early approach to our pre-sales and account teams in order to access the skill and expertise needed to ensure a holistic approach is taken at the planning stage.
Contact us now for a non-commital discussion about your project and let us explain how we believe we could assist.
