....from an article about Telewest "Our TV-on-d
Post# of 17650
"Our TV-on-demand service Teleport is bandwidth intensive and required a significant upgrade to our network distribution and edge layers," explained Joe Foster, director of network engineering and technical strategy for Telewest. "In planning for this service, we realized that by consolidating various networks over a single platform and upgrading our network edge - we could deliver the Teleport service and several other important projects more cost-effectively than if we had built a dedicated TVoD network."
Specifically, Telewest wanted to enable public telephone network users and existing data customers to migrate easily to the new IP-based services, while enjoying the same reliable service levels they were accustomed to. Business customers wanted higher-bandwidth Ethernet and IP virtual private network (VPN) services with quality of service (QoS) functionality. The company also wanted to assure future scalability and simplify network management by unifying its infrastructure on a single edge routing platform. As a result, the Telewest Edge Upgrade Programme was established, with the ultimate goal of supporting Telewest's business data, TV, Internet, and communications services on a common next-generation network backbone.
Business Value
The new Cisco solution provides the substantial broadband capacity required for the national rollout of Telewest's Teleportservice with ample additional bandwidth to support the growth of broadband services. Video content arrives in each regional headend location from a central ingress staging server, where quality assurance (QA) and other administrative activities are performed. Next, content is distributed over the core
IP network and stored on video servers. Subscribers choose the video program they want to watch and that video stream is sent between the regional headend and the hub site over the Telewest 10-Gbps edge network. It is then routed onto the cable HFC network for distribution to consumers' set-top boxes.
"The Cisco 7609 routing platform allowed us to converge Layer 2 and Layer 3 switching, voice, video, and data services over one network and standardize service and interface termination on one common edge point,"
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collate...72418.html
....past history also tells a story