Atrica Introduces A-1180 Ethernet Demarc Device

Atrica Inc. today announced the A-1180 Multiport Carrier Ethernet Demarcation Device, which delivers end-to-end service across third party networks. The Ethernet gearmaker also announced a new customer, American Fiber Systems Inc., which is using the A-1180

“The nice thing about the A-1180 is it can only connect to the Atrica network but it can connect as a standalone device to any third-party network,” said Umesh Kukreja, director of product marketing for Atrica. “So, if a customer happens to have Nortel or a Cisco switches to deliver some of the first-generation services, the A-1180 can connect with it on a standalone basis, or we can provision a tunnel from the A-1180 to the Atrica network and essentially provision it as an Atrica device across a third-party network.”

It’s this third scenario that enables carriers to deliver an end-to-end SLA even if some of a customer’s locations are on a competing platform, says Kukreja. This enables operators to move to high-end Carrier Ethernet service offerings enabled by Atrica without having to rip out their installed best-efforts network.

Aside from being a customer demarc device, the A-1180 can be used by carriers that want to offer Ethernet services outside their own regions using off-net facilities. The A-1180 can be used to connect the end customers on the access side and the off-net on the network side.

The A-1180 has eight 10/100Base-T Ethernet interfaces on the customer network side, each of which provisions an Ethernet Virtual Circuit (EVC) that corresponds to a service. It has an uplink slot on the service provider network side, which supports both Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet uplink modules, which use pluggable SFP transceivers, using either dual-strand or single-strand fiber of various distances.

“Our mission at AFS is to cost-effectively bring Ethernet to the WAN, and we are achieving that mission by leveraging advanced products such as the Atrica A-1180 in our state-of-the-art infrastructure,” said Dave Rusin, founder and CEO of AFS, a metro fiber provider serving enterprises and carriers in nine U.S cities. “With the A-1180 and the other products in the Atrica Carrier Ethernet portfolio, we are providing our customers with scalable, reliable, flexible Ethernet transport services with guaranteed end-to-end SLAs and a variety of QoS levels.”

AFS has deployed Atrica’s full carrier-class Ethernet product suite, including the A-8100 Carrier Ethernet Core Switch, A-4100 Carrier Ethernet Aggregation Switch, the A-2140 Carrier Ethernet Edge Switch, and the A-100, A-210 and A-1180 Carrier Ethernet Demarcation devices. It also is using the Atrica Service Platform for Ethernet Networks (ASPEN), an integrated service provisioning and management system.

The Atrica infrastructure enables AFS to deliver Ethernet Private Line Service from 50MB to 1GB in increments of 1MB, Ethernet Virtual Private Line Service and Ethernet Virtual LAN Service.

AFS provides metro fiber optic infrastructure and wholesale transport services to carriers and large enterprises. It has deployed more than 1.2 million miles of metro fiber since 2000 and has more than 500 on-net buildings. The carrier provides Ethernet, wavelength and TDM private line services as well as dark fiber infrastructure.

American Fiber Systems Inc. www.americanfibersystems.com.
Atrica Inc. www.atrica.com

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines