Offering vertical services to subscribers and service providers is an avenue
to immediately improve the competitiveness of digital subscriber line access service,
for example of the type offered by a local exchange carrier. To deliver high-quality
vertical services, however, the underlying ADSL Data Network (ADN) or the like
needs to establish Quality of Service (QoS) as a core characteristic and offer
an efficient mechanism for insertion of the vertical services. The inventive network
architecture introduces QoS into the ADN, in a manner that enables the delivery
of sophisticated and demanding IP-based services to subscribers, does not affect
existing Internet tiers of service, and is cost-effective in terms of initial costs,
build-out, and ongoing operations. The architecture utilizes a switch capable of
examining and selectively forwarding packets or frames based on higher layer information
in the protocol stack, that is to say on information that is encapsulated in the
layer-2 information utilized to define normal connectivity through the network.
The switch enables segregation of upstream traffic by type and downstream aggregation
of Internet traffic together with traffic from a local vertical services domain.
