RBN Inc, http://www.rbni.com, an industry-leading designer and manufacturer of carrier-class optical transport solutions for metro and access networks, announced a low cost, IPTV digital broadcast solution for carriers and MSOs.

The RBNi GigaEdge IPTV broadcast solution is the modern digital equivalent of the time-proven HFC analog video networks that have been the mainstay of the cable industry for the past 20 years. The RBN solution is targeted primarily at the head-end to central office distribution segment of the IPTV network, although it can also be deployed in the last-mile segment where required. A white paper that compares the RBNi GigaEdge solution and other IPTV broadcast and multicast solutions is available on RBN's website at: http://www.rbni.com/Video_Transport_and_Switching.pdf.

"RBN's digital broadcasting capability is a spin-off of the RBNi GigaEdge 8200 CWDM ROADM feature-set," said Ross Halgren, CTO and Network Architect of RBN Inc. "The GigaEdge 8200 has had a lossless physical layer broadcasting capability for some time but it has taken until now for the market to recover and for this feature's value to be realized. In the mean time, RBN has developed its new GigaEdge 2330 CWDM Muxponder which enhances this physical layer broadcast capability by maximizing the number of video channels transported per CWDM wavelength and per fiber-pair, supporting up to 8,000 standard MPEG channels in a broadcast ring configuration."

The OEO regeneration and switching features of the GigaEdge products support regional and metro rings, bridged-rings, spurs and tree topologies with either protected or unprotected IPTV video broadcasting or point-to-point video links. Video traffic can be transported and broadcast in any standard digital form, including DVB-ASI, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel or SONET/SDH. The benefit of RBN's lossless (regenerative) physical layer broadcast solution is that TV channels, Pay-Per-View channels and Near VoD channels can be broadcast over large distances between a head-end and multiple COs, without unnecessarily incurring the processing delay, delay variance and cost of routed IP video broadcast solutions. Instead, routing can be confined to the video traffic that is dropped at the edges of the metro/regional distribution network.