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Broadband edge

Your gateway to universal broadband

What is universal broadband?

Universal broadband access is essential to connect with the digital world, but over 2.5 billion people remain unconnected. Many more live in rural communities and older homes and connect over aging telephone wires that can no longer keep up with their growing bandwidth needs.

To bridge the digital divide and spur economic growth, operators and governments around the world are investing in fiber deployments. Fiber is the fastest and most future-safe access medium with the lowest carbon footprint. In addition, regulators are freeing up mmWave spectrum for shared and unlicensed use of 5G fixed-wireless access (FWA) where trenching fiber is too costly or time consuming.

To capitalize on these precious investments in faster access, you must scale your broadband edge as well, or you will be held back by bandwidth constraints further upstream. 

Universal broadband edge: Nokia Multi-Access Gateway

Multi-Access Gateway

What is broadband edge?

The broadband edge is an essential network demarcation point for managing subscriber access to digital content and services on the internet and in private clouds. It plays a crucial role in delivering, assuring and monetizing universal broadband services. It must be flexible and adaptive to support multiple access technologies, higher data speeds, more users and more services.

The Nokia Multi-Access Gateway addresses these needs with a scalable and versatile solution that supports multi-service applications for residential, enterprise, industrial and wholesale users over any access:

  • Broadband Network Gateway (BNG): To deliver broadband services using fiber-to-the-node (xDSL) and fiber-to-the-premises (xPON).
  • Fixed-wireless Access Gateway (FWAG): To complement broadband coverage with 4G and 5G fixed-wireless access and/or carrier Wi-Fi.

Read on to learn more about these applications.

Scale your broadband network gateway

If you are upgrading to fiber-based access, you can deploy our service routing portfolio to deliver universal broadband services for residential, business, industry and whole sale applications. Powered by our industry-leading FP5 silicon offers scalable capacity with deterministic service performance and energy efficiency, as well as line-rate DDoS filtering and traffic encryption. Over 300 service providers are already using Nokia service routers as their BNG.

If you are a large operator that has deployed hundreds of BNGs, you can increase scalability, performance and operational efficiency even further with a disaggregated BNG deployment that uses control and user plane separation (CUPS). This approach enables you to virtualize and independently scale control plane functions in regional datacenters, and scale high-bandwidth user plane functions on distributed service routers in the edge cloud. 

Nokia led the CUPS standard specification in Broadband Forum TR-459. We are first to market with commercial deployments. Read our application note for more details.

Read our BNG solution brochure to learn more about scaling your wireline broadband edge.

Scale your fixed-wireless access gateway

If you are looking to offer fiber-grade broadband services over FWA, you can use our service routing portfolio to scale 4G (SPGW) and/or 5G user plane functions (UPFs) while reducing costs for energy and rack space. Our TCO analysis shows that scaling UPFs on our latest FP5 service routers consumes up to 6x less energy and 5x less rack space compared to virtualized UPF deployments.

GPRS tunnels (GTP-U) from 4G and 5G radio access nodes are terminated directly on router line cards equipped with our purpose-built FP network processors. This ensures that UPFs will meet the capacity and cost constraints of broadband internet, IPTV and over-the-top video content. Built-in IP multicast and BGP peering features enable efficient delivery of IPTV and internet traffic while offloading the mobile core.

Converged and mobile operators can use the disaggregated CUPS deployment model to interface the control plane functions (SPGW and/or SMF) with a 3GPP Service-Based Architecture (SBA) in 5G NSA or SA mode using standard-compliant interfaces (S11/N11, N7, N10). 

Wireline operators can continue to use existing RADIUS AAA infrastructure to seamlessly manage wireline and fixed-wireless broadband subscribers. 

Read our FWA solution brochure to learn more about scaling fixed-wireless broadband. 
 

Deliver rural broadband services

If you want to connect small communities with a few thousand homes, our Virtual Service Router appliances will offer you a flexible and versatile broadband subscriber edge that can fit in a single rack unit. 

To minimize deployment lead times and upfront cost, we have integrated our Multi-Access Gateway in the network-in-a-box concept, together with our industry-leading broadband access solutions. Flexible licensing, configuration and interfacing options enable you to easily connect your fiber access network with Internet exchanges, colocation providers and other partners for broadband service retail or wholesale.

Bridging the digital divide is a cornerstone of our corporate mission to help the world act together. Our customer events such as Get to Fast Faster can get you up to speed on the latest developments, and our professional services team and system integration partners stand ready to help you plan, deploy and operate. 

Please refer to our rural broadband page to learn more about our broadband solutions and services for small communities.

Secure your broadband edge

Connecting more homes and business at faster speeds also increases the frequency and magnitude of distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These are botnet attacks that direct malware-infected user devices such a PCs, servers, laptops and webcams to generate huge volumes of bogus traffic that can severely congest your network, cripple its services, and cut off their users.

The Nokia solution can help you transform your broadband edge from a lens that can be abused to focus distributed DDoS attacks on selected targets, into a shield to protect vulnerable users and valuable services. It leverages the powerful AI-capabilities of Nokia Deepfield, a software-based DDoS detection and analytics solution capable of processing and analyzing the massive volumes of streaming telemetry data produced by Multi-Access Gateway routers. In a matter of seconds, Deepfield Defender can positively identify DDoS attacks, their methods, sources and target systems. It can then automatically determine and deploy surgical counter measures at the broadband edge to block the attack and prevent further damage and disruption.

A secure broadband edge gives you a leg up for your customers and against your competitors!
Check out our infographic to learn more about our DDoS security solution.

 

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