The ETX-202A is part of the EtherAccess® product suite, designed to enable REAL (Reliable, Economical, Accountable and Limitless) carrier-grade Ethernet services. The ETX-202A Carrier Ethernet demarcation device is owned and operated by the service provider and installed at customer premises. In addition to providing clear demarcation between provider and customer networks in FTTB (Fiber To The Business) deployments, the ETX-202A delivers Gigabit Ethernet access with end-to-end performance monitoring and management capabilities. RAD’s intelligent demarcation approach allows complete network visibility up to subscriber endpoints and facilitates remote management of differentiated services, regardless of the various protocols involved in the traffic path, the underlying networks or number of operators who own them.
The ETX-202A is also designed to deliver managed quality of service in next generation radio access networks (RANs), allowing mobile operators to enhance their 3.5G/4G service performance by combining Ethernet aggregation with OAM and SLA enforcement capabilities. The built-in Ethernet Service OAM and Ethernet Link OAM functionalities enable proactive service monitoring and easy fault localization – starting at the LTE eNodeB, HSDPA base station or WiMAX cell site.
ETX-202A carries Ethernet traffic over fiber from subscriber end-points to the network’s edge, delivering access rates of up to 1,000 Mbps. The ETX-202A facilitates seamless transport of Ethernet traffic over different media by allowing any fiber/copper combination with a variety of UTP- and SFP-based network and user ports. Furthermore, ETX-202A supports a wide selection of SFP transceivers, allowing service providers to optimally connect customers located at different distances over various wavelengths.
The ETX-202A maps ingress traffic to Ethernet flows (EVC.CoS or Ethernet virtual connection classes of service) using all-to-one and bundling schemes. In addition, it supports traffic classification according to any user-defined criteria, such as:
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CE-VLAN ID
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CE-VLAN priority (Pbit)
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Customer DSCP/ ToS
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Subscriber port
The ETX-202A also supports CoS ID combinations, including VLAN ID + Pbit, VLAN ID + IP Precedence and many others. It enables carriers to manage congestion intelligently and allows users to benefit from performance guarantees for customized service packages that fit their needs. This is achieved by applying rate limitation parameters such as CIR (committed information rate), CBS (committed burst size), EIR (excess information rate) and EBS (excess burst size) to each class of service. Enhanced quality of service is further supported by eight flexible queues combining strict priority (SP) and weighted fair queue (WFQ) scheduling, to efficiently handle real-time, premium and best-effort traffic. The ETX-202A also uses weighted random early detection (WRED) policy to ensure that the queues are not congested and that high priority traffic is not dropped.
Using VLAN stacking (also known as double-tagging or Q-in-Q), the service provider can assign different service VLANs to traffic from different customers, thereby guaranteeing separation between each customer’s traffic within the service provider network. Customer VLAN encapsulation with service VLANs also allows transparent Ethernet LAN service (TLS).
ETX-202A Carrier Ethernet demarcation device features enhanced Ethernet OAM capabilities, to enable remote and automatic fault localization without service interruptions or costly on-site inspections. ETX-202A’s comprehensive Ethernet OAM suite includes:
Ethernet Link OAM, based on IEEE 802.3-2005 (formerly 802.3ah), enabling link performance monitoring and remote fault indication for the Ethernet link connecting the customer location and the network. The ETX-202A NTU supports dying gasp and in-service, non-intrusive loopback testing.
Ethernet Service OAM, based on standard IEEE 802.1ag, for fault localization over a single link or the entire service path.
Performance Measurement, per ITU-T Y.1731, including frame delay, frame delay variation (“Jitter”), frame loss, and availability.
In addition to the non-intrusive OAM-based loopback testing, ETX-202A supports Layer-2 loopback for link integrity diagnostics, performed per VLAN or EVC, whereby the ETX-202A swaps the source and destination MAC addresses without disrupting the traffic flows that are not being tested.
ETX-202A features flexible management capabilities, including local management via an ASCII terminal (RS-232). In addition, remote management can be performed either inband or out-of-band, using the network or user ports. Advanced FCAPS (Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, and Security) and diagnostic tools are provided by RADview-EMS, RAD’s carrier-class element management system, via an SNMP-based GUI.
The ETX-202A also supports a variety of configuration access channels, including CLI over Telnet, SNMP, Web server, and TFTP. Incorporated security features include Secure Shell (SSH), Web-based Secure Socket Layer (SSL), SNMPv3, and RADIUS, as well as management access control list (ACL).
High-level service resiliency and five nines (99.999%) reliability require uplink redundancy. The ETX-202A provides this capability by supporting various redundancy modes, including link aggregation (1+1) based on 802.3ad with link aggregation control protocol (LACP), as well as dual homing (1:1).
