BRIDGE Technologies / solutions / cases / Get

Cases/GET: National cable distribution backbone with IP/MPLS

GET (formerly known as UPC Norway) is Norway's leading digital-tv- and broadband provider. Get offers their services to private homes in Oslo, Asker, Buskerud, Østfold, Bergen, Stavanger, Haugesund, Kristiansand and Trondheim. Get has today Norway's largest network to private customers after Telenor. Get's network passes approximately 500 000 homes and services closer to 480 000 customers (RGUs). These include 368 400 tv customers, 110 000 digital-tv customers, 80 000 broadband Internet- and 33 000 telephone customers.

From their main headquarters in Oslo, Get turns around about 120 DVB S and Telco TV services, de-scramble all incoming services, encapsulate all MPEG2 signals over UDP and apply it’s own Conditional Access. SPTS signals are then inserted into an IP/MPLS backbone for distribution to 7 main regional cable headends. Here, the signals are locally multiplexed and go to local modulators for QAM delivery into their respective coaxial distribution networks.

“We had to get our distributed network and services up and running fast. The BRIDGETECH distributed monitoring system is a key operational component which we provisioned from day one. BRIDGETECH probes and the Video Bridge Controller give us full visibility of the signal flow, and that’s vital when you are running a 24/7 operation”
states Christophe Brod, Broadcast Network Manager at GET.

With an ever increasing requirement for bandwidth capacity due to the demand for high speed internet capacity and for transportation of a complete Triple-Play program, GET decided to implement a new roadmap to be able to expand networked services far into the future. The choice went to an IP/MPLS infrastructure to transport the broadcast services based on MPEG-2 multicasts.

The network was initiated in multiple phases and the BRIDGETECH monitoring system was implemented from the start of deployment, enabling easy configuration and service detection. From conception to execution the GET roll out has been a great success and goes to prove that with careful planning and implementation, IP is the perfect technology for seamless transportation of multiple services.