Intelligent Access

Carrier Access is revolutionizing the industry with its latest innovation - Intelligent Access™

The Challenge Facing Wireless Operators
Wireless operators throughout the world are experiencing unprecedented growth. Mobile penetration is as high as 70% in some markets and new value added services are promising to attract even higher traffic volumes. As cell sites are expanded to accommodate more mobile traffic and new services like EDGE and UMTS, so too must the transmission bandwidth, linking these sites. More bandwidth means an increase in annual operating costs and capital investment. In addition, AMPS, TDMA, and GSM sites remain inefficient and expensive to provision.

Consequently, wireless operators are demanding a more intelligent solution to compliment their DCS, a solution that will not only recover unused capacity, but will also “compress” the overall bandwidth demands of a cell site.

Problem: Until now, the only way to increase the Access network efficiency was to utilize a DCS system to recover unused or stranded E1 or T1 bandwidth at hub site, however this has a limited benefit.

The Carrier Access Intelligent Access Solution
Intelligent Access is a state-of-the-art, high-speed processing technology developed as an upgrade option for the already very versatile and successful Carrier Access suite of RAN transmission products — Axxius® 800 and MASTERseries™ platforms. This allows cutomers to leverage significant gains on existing infrastructure for minimal investment.

Intelligent Access allows operators to:

• Overlay – provides multiple RAN aggregation and transport.
• Converge – improves efficiency of transport over a common protocol.
• Compress – provides the maximum gain with the most complexity to optimize transport

Solution: Intelligent Access utilizes the Carrier Access Axxius 800 or MASTERseries at the cell site to achieve a true end-to-end process.
Solution: Intelligent Access utilizes the Axxius 800 and Tellabs CCPM at the BSC to achieve a true end-to-end process.
Solution: Intelligent Access dramatically reduces AMPS, TDMA, and GSM cell site transmission bandwidth requirements. Intelligent Access constantly optimizes and compresses cell traffic in real time, ensuring efficient use of transmission bandwidth throughout the life cycle of the cell site. It also re-formats the traffic into packets that can be carried on the same Access links as UMTS traffic. This allows the UMTS and other traffic to efficiently share bandwidth and avoid the additional expense of providing separate UMTS links.

How Does Intelligent Access Work?
The Intelligent Access functionality of the FLEXmaster and QuadFLEX Service Modules is made possible by Carrier Access’ new FLEXengine™ technology. A powerful network-processing platform that performs transport optimization and complex protocol inter-working functions, FLEXengine delivers 3 crucial benefits:

• Efficiency – FLEXengine supports overlay, converged, and compression techniques to deliver efficient transport.
• Scalability – FLEXengine scales to meet diverse market needs ranging from small cell sites to large cell sites and hub sites, and mobile switching centers.
• Programmability – FLEXengine can be custom configured and remotely programmed to meet diverse and changing RAN transport requirements. This eliminates the need to send technicians to the site to change the RAN transport configurations. By doing dramatically reducing AMPS, TDMA, and GSM cell site transmission bandwidth requirements, Intelligent Access doubles the capacity of the Radio Access Network links — links that represent more than 30% of a wireless operator’s annual operating expense.

These savings also lead to cost reductions in other areas:

• Total annual costs for E1/ T1s installations substantially reduced.
• Reduced number of DCS ports used, resulting in reduced forecast equipment costs
• Reduced effort requirement by design and operations teams to deploy UMTS
• Reduced incremental microwave link operational costs

Intelligent Access has a dramatic affect on bottom line revenues and the return on investment is extremely short, as Intelligent Access can pay for itself in as little as six months. And with increased profits, lower leased line and maintenance costs due to fewer E1/T1s, and increase subscribers with more value-added, UMTS-based services.

Products that Utilize Intelligent Access

»	Axxius 800
»	MASTERseries