19 May 2003 San Jose, CA Lightwave--The Resilient Packet Ring Alliance, an industry advocacy group promoting resilient packet ring (RPR) technology and its standardization by IEEE, announced the availability of its first business case study comparing RPR as an alternative method for adding data services to SONET/SDH networks. The study analyzes capital expenditures (capex) and optical expenditures (opex) of a SONET/SDH network with RPR technology, from an initial deployment to scenarios that increase users, and bandwidth per users.
"Carriers today face many challenges in terms of rolling out tomorrow's metro services-video, voice, and data-while controlling capex and opex," said John Hawkins, chair of the RPR Alliance and senior marketing manager for Nortel Networks. "This business case shows how RPR can be deployed over an existing SONET/SDH network as it evolves to address multi-service requirements. But this is only the tip of the iceberg, and we look forward to publishing additional business case analyses that explore a variety of service rollout scenarios in addition to this one."
"The attraction of RPR is that many carriers that like the reliability and resiliency of rings and already have SONET or SDH rings, can readily deploy RPR over those existing rings," said Michael Howard, principal analyst at Infonetics Research. "We have measured the growing interest from the carriers in RPR both in terms of testing and deploying pre-standard RPR implementations and awaiting approval of the 802.17 standard. RPR offers carriers a way to increase revenues via new metro services while leveraging their historical investment in the network."
"Service providers are receptive to RPR as an evolution strategy for existing networks because RPR simplifies the ability to provision circuits to handle bursty data services efficiently with quality of service," said Marian Stasney, managing partner of Telecom Inquiry Solutions. "The business case illustrates that an RPR network not only lowers initial deployment costs but also reduces ongoing operational costs as networks are scaled."
The RPR business case study is available on the RPR Web site, http://www.rpralliance.com/articles/business_case_latest.pdf.
Principal members of the RPR Alliance include Cisco Systems, Corrigent Systems, Lantern Communications, and Nortel Networks. Alliance Semiconductor, ARRIS, Cortina Systems, Infineon Technologies, Intel, and Ixia are participating members in the Alliance.