The role of MPLS in delivering triple-play services

Providing triple play services (voice, video and data) for residential consumers is the key ingredient of many carriers' strategies for increased revenue and competitiveness. To fend off the attacks of cable operators and competitive carriers on their core business (telephony), carriers are striking back on the MSOs' traditional turf - video with enhanced service offerings. At the same time, the war goes on in Internet access services, with increased bandwidth and declining prices. Wireline carriers have begun to offer triple-play services while leveraging new digital subscribe line (DSL) technologies such as ADSL2+ and VDSL2 on their exiting copper infrastructure. Other operators have started to deploy fiber to the home in order to boost the capacity of the services per residence. This paper describes the different methods of delivering an aggregation solution for these access technologies. It describes routing-based aggregation solutions were first used by operators to deliver triple play services and explores their limitations, that. Later, this paper describes the migration of the networks to an MPLS-based aggregation solution, the problems it solves and the benefits it delivers.