PAETEC and Alcatel-Lucent announced the first deployment of a new Geographic Redundancy solution that increases the reliability of PAETEC’s VoIP network.
PAETEC said this deployment in its network, which already operated at “Five 9s” reliability, further minimizes the down time that may be caused by a catastrophic incident, such as a hurricane’s direct hit on a central office. In such a situation, restoration could take minutes or hours in the most extreme of circumstances.
Geographic redundancy means that call-control components of the central office are deployed in two geographically disparate locations. One is “live”, and the other is on “stand- by.”
PAETEC’s network has already been architected in a way that allows existing calls to remain connected without disruption in a scenario where the call-control component of the network becomes unavailable. In such a scenario, standing call traffic would continue to be routed over PAETEC’s MPLS-enabled, IP network. With the implementation of geographic redundancy, the network can recognize an interruption and engage the back-up network controller or signaling gateway to also allow for the initiation and reception of new voice calls almost immediately.
PAETEC has deployed the Alcatel-Lucent back-up in Illinois and New York. The platform consists of the Alcatel-Lucent Network Controller, Signaling Gateway (SG) and Network Gateway (NG). This solution allows PAETEC to activate the back-up signaling gateway or network controller without dropping existing calls. The transitions to a geographically redundant component can either be automated or performed manually by an administrator when necessary.
http://www.paetec.com
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com
