Ikanos Offers Physical-Layer QoS in Fifth-Gen Family of VDSL2 Chipsets

Ikanos Communications Inc. has come out with new multimode VDSL2 chipsets that allow for traffic classification at the physical layer to enable dynamic bandwidth provisioning that addresses service providers’ triple-play requirements. The company has also upped the performance on its fifth-generation VDSL2 chipsets, which will ship in volume in late September.

The chipsets include both versions that can be embedded in central office or remote terminal gear, as well as products designed for use within devices at subscriber locations. NEC Magnus Communications Ltd., which has been using Ikanos products and technology for more than four years, is the first announced turnkey-equipment supplier to publicly announce its intention to use the chipsets. NEC plans to embed the Fx100100-5 (one of the CO/RT products) and Fx100100S-5 (for use in subscriber devices) chipsets in its VDSL2 gear.

Piyush Sevalia, director of product marketing at Ikanos, said equipment based on these new chipsets will allow telcos to optimize traffic delivery so consumers will get a much better experience than they get today. For example, if a subscriber is watching an IPTV channel on TV, another person in the house is on the Internet, while a third person is on a VoIP phone in the house, the Ikanos technology can dynamically redistribute bandwidth within the home if one or more of those individuals ends his or her IP session(s). The Ikanos traffic classification feature also can help service providers provision a service – such as bandwidth for a video call – for a limited amount of time, so service providers can bill for the connection based on the span of time it’s in use, he added.

The chipsets’ classification engine puts traffic into different queues, which can be of different sizes, with voice coming out first, then IGMP traffic, video and then data, he said. The fact that Ikanos does that classification at the physical layer – rather than just doing prioritization at the Layer 2 switch, for example – means that the highest priority traffic, which in the case of the triple play is voice, comes out first on the receiving end, with the next highest priority traffic following, and so on, said Sevalia. “If you don’t have these features at the physical layer, then what you put into the physical layer you get out of the physical layer,” he said. “Nobody else that we know of has integrated these features at the physical layer.”

The multimode CO/RT chipsets consist of the Fx100100-5, which supports all VDSL2 profiles – 8a, 8b, 8c, 8d, 12a, 12b, 17a and 30a – and is optimized for 30MHz spectrum operation to offer 100/100mbps performance; and the Fx10050-5, which supports VDSL2 profiles 8a, 8b, 8c, 8d, 12a, 12b and 17a, and is optimized for 17.6MHz spectrum utilization to offer 100/50mbps performance.

Both the CO and CPE chipsets are the first in the industry to support VDSL1 (ITU-T G.993.1), ADSL (ITU-T G.992.1), ADSL2 (ITU-T G.992.3) and ADSL2+ (ITU-T G.992.5) and deliver “true plug-and-play multimode operation” on a per port basis. The chipsets support all current band plans defined in the standards for their respective profiles and will be able to support all future band plans, according to Ikanos.

Ikanos Communications Inc. www.ikanos.com

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