Often, commuter traffic enters the metro through broadband access services instead of traditional, low-speed WAN or dial lines. And POPs are growing beyond their traditional roles of aggregation and multiplexing to include content-driven services. The increase in access bandwidth combined with the demand for high-volume content services housed in POPs means that the metro now carries a rapidly growing percentage of traffic on public networks. Consequently, metropolitan service providers are looking for ways to cost-effectively scale their MAN networks to handle the increased load. The Internet changed that.
Data now outweighs voice both in traffic volume and growth rates.
Cisco provides several solutions for the optical MAN, giving service providers the choices they need to meet their particular infrastructure and transport requirements. Where fiber exhaust is imminent, Cisco offers DWDM solutions optimized and priced for the metro to increase fiber capacity. Ethernet as Broadband An emerging trend in broadband access service is Ethernet to the metro ring. Ethernet is relatively inexpensive and enterprise customers understand it. To transmit a DS1 signal up to an OC-48 ring requires a minimum of four boxes.