ILECs find themselves in a very difficult environment. Competitive threats have grown while at the same time the economic climate has increased the pressure to reduce costs and has limited the capital available to invest in new revenue-generating services.

While the threat from competitive local-exchange carriers (CLECs) has abated, even more serious competition has emerged from cable operators. In addition to television, they lead in residential broadband services and are methodically and strategically entering residential voice and business data service markets. Increasingly, cable operators are combining these services into bundled offerings.

Fortunately, the technology landscape has been changing in ways that allow ILECs to remain competitive. For example, the commercial success of the Internet has driven subscriber demand for bandwidth, leading to the development of a range of digital subscriber line (DSL) technologies. Most telcos now offer high-speed connectivity to residential and business customers over existing copper lines. To deliver DSL services, telcos typically augmented their existing networks. As a result, many ILECs now have a combination of circuit and cell technologies deployed in parallel or mixed with their existing infrastructure. However, this combination of time division multiplexing (TDM) with an overlay asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network limits the potential for significant cost reduction as well as the ability to offer innovative new revenue-producing services.

Now, by using new IP packet-based access network and switching technologies, telcos can reduce their costs and also offer new services. Many carriers are pursuing circuit-to-packet migration as their strategic technology direction in order to shift service creation and delivery to the lower-cost and more flexible IP structures. Several new product developments are key to this migration. Specifically, softswitches enable the transition for voice services; digital head ends deliver IP video; and broadband loop carrier (BLC) systems allow the convergence of voice, data, and video on a single access network infrastructure.

By leveraging packet-based technologies, ILECs can remain competitive by delivering triple-play services—voice, data, and video—over DSL links. In this paper, we examine how BLC technologies and products are used as examples of how to enable ILECs to deploy a high-performance, reliable, cost-effective access network for triple-play service delivery.