AFC Provides Details on its FTTP Solution

 Ryan Koontz, director of marketing at AFC, says its FTTP solution is unique in the marketplace for several reasons.

It enables service providers to leverage their existing investments in the AccessMAX, which he says has more than 100,000 shelves and more than 8 million lines deployed with carriers industrywide. Every AccessMAX AFC has shipped since 1996 can be upgraded to FiberDirect, says Koontz. That means service providers with existing AccessMAX products not only maximize use of their existing boxes, but they also can easily convert customers from copper to fiber and can leverage the time they’ve put into tech training, processes and support systems already in place to support AccessMAX, he explains.

According to Koontz, FiberDirect is also unique because it supports PON, IP voice or TDM voice in a single shelf. Some other solutions require a new GR303 upgrade to Class 5 switches to support voice, he says. He adds that AFC has been aggressive in the development of H.248/Megaco, which the company believes will help simplify the transition from Class 5 to IP voice switching. “FTTP will be a catalyst for IP voice because it’s packetized at the customer premises,” he says, replacing the need to convert it on the network edge.

The FiberDirect card is based on the FSAN version of PON. With a 32-to-1 split, the system reaches up to 20km and delivers 622mbps downstream and 155mbps upstream. It can be deployed in central office or remote terminal scenarios.

Meriton Unveils New Architecture, Products

Meriton Networks Inc. last month at NFOEC in Orlando unveiled its HSM (high-speed metro) architecture — which delivers a variety of services including SONET, gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel and SAN on a shared WDM infrastructure — and three new products under the HSM umbrella.

The architecture and new products are a direct result of Meriton’s “Fortune 5000 Initiative” which had the vendor survey high-profile enterprises such as Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs to see what top companies were looking to do with highspeed services, says Gwen Avery, Meriton’s director of marketing. Meriton went directly to these companies to ask about their needs after service providers told the vendor they weren’t seeing significant demand for such services. The “Fortune 5000 Initiative” revealed a strong demand for high-speed services from this user group, but not at the price service providers were offering the services, says Avery. Meriton says the companies it surveyed also expressed their frustration with long provisioning times and expensive moves, adds and changes.

Meriton product manager Coleman Hum says the company addresses all those concerns with its new HSM architecture, which he says enables service providers to deliver a variety of high-speed services with a “WDM out of the box” solution that delivers SONET-like network management and SLAs. Hum says delivering services over wavelengths rather than over SONET is 60 percent less expensive. And because HSM is a shared environment, he adds, the costs are lower per user as new users are added.

The company has already been selling its metro core CWDM/DWDM 7200 OADX box. With the new HSM architecture, Meriton also adds the 3300 OSU, a metro access mux that can aggregate traffic at the customer premises or the carrier’s point of presence. It can support CWDM and DWDM. And all cards have SFP (small form factor pluggable) plug-in optical interfaces, so service providers can plug in the services they need when they need them, says Coleman Hum, product manager, adding that SFPs cost 50 percent less than the average WDM interface. Four SFPs can fit into one Meriton 3300 OSU.

Also new from Meriton are the 1450 OFA and the 1100 DCM. The former is a collection of pre-, post- and inline amplifiers for DWDM applications. They feature extended variable gain range, noise figure and gain flatness, automatic gain control and fast transient response. The latter is a suite of dispersion compensation modules that enhances the performance of DWDM 2.5- and 10-gbps longer reach optical networks.

The 7200 is currently in three trials in North America. The 3300 was expected to be in trials beginning last month.

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