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Principal Sponsors:
 | Integrated Access Solutions |
Definition and Overview
Definition
Employing a variety of configurations, integrated access solutions consolidate voice, data, Internet, and video network services on a single platform over shared high-speed access lines to increase network efficiencies and reduce costs.
Overview
It is called the last-mile problem: providing customers with their choice of services from a variety of existing and emerging telecommunications offerings. Customers may want the latest and greatest in communications technologies—voice, frame relay, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), integrated services digital network (ISDN)—but even with the impressive advances in telecommunications today, everything often comes to a screeching halt at the point where the service provider's network meets the customer's own equipment.
Traditionally, bridging this last-mile boundary between the service provider and the customer often means time-consuming trenching and big capital investments in new switches and associated hardware. If more than one service is involved, the solution calls for more trenching, more switches, and, of course, more check writing. Then the business grows. A critical market changes. New technology is required. And, again, carriers find themselves digging trenches with their checkbooks.
Enter the integrated access solution, which consolidates the boundary functions for multiple network connections. By employing a single piece of equipment at the customer's location, end users have access to virtually any offering—voice, ISDN, frame relay, high-speed data, and ATM, to name a few—on a T1 or E1 line that efficiently carries the services back to the carrier's point of presence (PoP).
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