Interconnect in practice: physical arrangements

The proliferation of licensed telecommunications operators in the UK has led to an increasing requirement for interconnection between public telecommunications networks. It is now common for telecommunications services to be provided across several interconnected networks, rather than supported on a single network. The highly competitive telecommunications market has given rise to a growth in the number of service providers, who package services from a number of network operators into forms that suit their customers. Such service providers require that their services are delivered seamlessly across a number of interconnected networks, and become understandably frustrated when the features that they can potentially offer are constrained by limitations in the links between the underlying networks. This is particularly true where the networks are built using SDH transmission technology, because service providers do not want to lose the end-to-end OA&M features supported by SDH whenever a service crosses a network boundary. Interconnection between networks can take several forms, depending upon the type of traffic or services being passed between the networks: switch interconnect, data interconnect and transmission interconnect.