The Access Network Design module finds the correct balance among homing, hardware and backbone costs. It considers the use of dedicated private lines, channel banks and other services. Access designs range from simple homing of location to backbone MUX sites to secondary concentration homing designs. Once the access portion of the network is completed, files can be generated to perform a Backbone Design.
Access design optimally homes locations to MUX sites by minimizing the access transmission costs. The program is able to select the optimal backbone MUX locations from a MUX candidate list provided by the user, homing locations based on each locations traffic requirement into the backbone cloud.
To further reduce network costs, Access Network Design supports two-level concentrations. Rather than home to a switch directly, offnet circuits may home to lower-level concentrator sites first. The circuits are aggregated at the lower-level concentrator sites before being carried to the backbone switches. The lower-level concentrator sites may be customer locations, Interexchange Carrier Points of Presence (IXC POP), or Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) wire centers, using LEC Frame Relay services or T1 Channel Banks. The program can select the optimal concentrator sites from a list of user-supplied candidates, or program determined candidates.
Once the optimal concentrator sites are selected and the locations homed, backbone designs can then be performed and analyzed through the Backbone Design module.
Customizations for more sophisticated access network design features, such as diversity constraints and switch selection, can be negotiated. An example is the ability to handle the Microwave Drop and Insert capability of analog circuits. The drop and insert points (DIP) are candidate homing points for the offnet analog voice circuits. Analog circuits can terminate at the DIPS, and then ride on the microwave analog circuits to the backbone nodes.