As part of the Tata Group, one of India's most respected business conglomerates, Tata Communications delivers managed solutions to multinational enterprises, broadcasters, service providers and Indian consumers.

To enable these services, Tata utilizes one of the most advanced and largest submarine cable networks and a Tier-1 IP network with connectivity to more than 200 countries across 400 points-of-presence (PoPs).

In 2008, Tata began plans to broaden its service offering to include comprehensive support for professional media services covering the sub-continent's major cities as well as international connectivity to Europe, North America and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Up until now, Tata had been offering support for video services over its legacy SDH network. However, a new network was needed to provide an integrated solution for native media formats such as ASI, SDI, HD-ASI and AES/ EBU as well as IP. The platform needed to be fully flexible on the network side, interfacing to both PDH (DS3) and SDH (STM-1 through STM-64) links and offer a migration path for video over Internet Protocol/Multi-Protocol Label Switching (IP/MPLS).

Perhaps even more importantly, Tata wanted a solution that would support a range of service classes to its broadcast customers. This included a full graphical overview of the status of all network resources to quickly provision services end-to-end, as well as monitor service quality and performance. When required, the network management system should also allow Tata's end-users to manage their part of the network using secure and highly granular client management‚ definitions.

The solution

After thorough evaluation and testing, the Net Insight Nimbra platform was selected for the Tata Communications global network for its multi-service capabilities, future scalability, quality of service and a wide range of network restoration options. The strong features of the Nimbra Vision network management system also impressed Tata.

The backbone network is implemented as a hybrid ring-and-mesh topology around the globe with dual Nimbra switches at all PoP locations. At customer locations, single or dual chassis are deployed depending on availability requirements. ASI and IP MPEG connectivity is initially offered with services that are either connected at the PoP (unmanaged) or at the CPE (managed).

Genius Wong, senior vice-president, Global Network Services at Tata Communications, explained why the company chose Net Insight's Nimbra platform: "We have selected the Nimbra platform for rolling out Tata Communications Video Connect service, a networking solution which is designed for broadcasters, studios and production houses to deliver video content flexibly and cost-effectively to media hotspots worldwide. Net Insight's proven track record has made them an ideal platform for our global video distribution network."

The new global media network was successfully launched at the end of 2009 for media operators and local broadcasters who exchange content between India, Europe, the US, Australia and other Asian countries. Some Tata Communications customers, who are also existing Net Insight customers, have deployed their own Nimbra networks and have the ability to reach India using the Tata Communications network. The comprehensive set of network restoration options in the Nimbra platform is used to implement the different service classes.

The Platinum+ service uses fast, open-ended one-plus-one protection for multicast services, while the Platinum service uses high-priority automatic re-routing combined with headend protection for hardware redundancy.At the Network Operations Centre (NOC) in India, redundant Nimbra Vision servers are connected to the network elements using both the in-band management channel of the Nimbra network and out-band connections over Tata's IP/MPLS network.The end-to-end provisioning capabilities and graphical overview featured in the Nimbra Vision management system make it easy to manage the network and allow for easy set-up of services with either pre-defined or dynamic allocation of bandwidth. The flexible multicast solution of the Nimbra platform also enables Tata to monitor actual video feeds at the NOC.

Owing to the positive reception and increasing bandwidth demands from customers, further expansion and scaling up of the network is already under evaluation.

Key features of Nimbra 130

• Contribution compression. JPEG2000 is a high-quality compression technique. As such, it is suitable and preferred in contribution environments, where uncompressed video traditionally has been preferred. This enables operators to save on expensive transmission capacity.
• Frame-by-frame compression. JPEG2000 is a picture-by-picture compression algorithm and is therefore not introducing any compression artifacts from motion in the picture. The efficiency of the compression is deduced from the level of details in each picture, not from the motion in the video. It also offers very low compression delay, typically 100 ms per link (coding and decoding).
• Both SD and HD. The Nimbra 130 supports compression of both SD-SDI and HD-SDI. The feature licences allow users to tailor their deployment with HD capabilities only where needed, and easily upgrade from SD to HD without touching the hardware.
• Interface flexibility. The compressed video signal can be presented as IP (electrical or optical) or ASI and be connected to an available Nimbra port accordingly.
• Audio and ancillary data. The Nimbra 130 is transparent to vertical ancillary data and embedded audio. It allows the user to choose which audio channels to forward to in the compressed signal.
• Strong network management. Nimbra Vision presents status and alarms from the Nimbra 130 and provides quick access to the Nimbra 130 Element Manager for user-friendly configuration. It also provides a standard SNMP interface for integration in other management systems.
• Multiple uplink options. The Nimbra 130 can be configured for connection to, for instance, a collocated Nimbra 360 via Ethernet or ASI, or to a remote Nimbra 680 over an IP access link.

(Courtesy: APB)