General Bandwidth, a leading Voice over IP (VoIP) equipment manufacturer enabling rapid deployment and new service revenue generation over broadband networks, announces that it has implemented PseudoWire Emulation End-to-End (PWE3) in its award-winning G6 Universal Media Gateway that allows carriers to migrate legacy services onto new video and data packet networks, such as IPTV/FTTN and GPON.

Due to the advance of IPTV and packet technologies, carriers often have two very different access networks -- an older one based in Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) and a newer one based on packet and IP. Carriers are therefore faced with the difficult prospect of either maintaining their old and new access networks, or incurring the costs of migrating all TDM customers to packet-based services such as Voice over IP (VoIP).

PWE3, however, provides another access packetization option that has inherent advantages over VoIP. As an emerging standard supported by the Metro Ethernet Forum and IETF, PWE3 enables legacy service transport over Ethernet, IP, and MPLS networks, including support for both TDM-based voice and point-to-point data services. Requiring no protocol conversions, PWE3 performs a simple packetization of the TDM information so that it can be transported through the packet access network but remain unchanged at either destination.

Digital Loop Carriers (DLCs) and business services like T1 and PRI make up a large component of the TDM access network, and these services can be easily transported over the IPTV packet network via PWE3. General Bandwidth's NEBS3-certified, carrier class G6 platform serves as the Central Office or headend aggregation point and terminates these PWE3 TDM services into Class 5 switches or routers. However, when a customer eventually subscribes to new VoIP services, a unique feature of the G6 platform allows it to convert the TDM voice traffic to VoIP for control by softswitches or SIP application servers.

"Moving to a single, unified access network is now a reachable goal," said Charles Vogt, president and chief executive officer of General Bandwidth. "No service provider wants to be burdened by the costs of operating two vastly different networks, and we have developed a universal, cost-effective solution to ensure that legacy services can easily be transported over these new access networks and connected to either their legacy or next generation destinations."