Doug on IP Comm » Ethernet

ADTRAN beefs up Ethernet, FTTH hardware

Doug Mohney — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 19:26:04 +0000

In a pair of announcements last week, ADTRAN (www.adtran.com) added to its Carrier Ethernet portfolio and doubled the capacity of its Total Access 5000 for Active Ethernet and GPON applications.

On the Ethernet side, new solutions include:

NetVanta 868 Carrier Ethernet Access Gateway for large enterprises.
- Extending 100 – 400Mbps Ethernet services to a variety of vertical markets whose locations continue to wait for fiber installation.

NetVanta 850 Carrier Ethernet Access Gateway for infrastructure backhaul.
- Extending 50 – 100Mbps Ethernet backhaul services to service both cell site and DSLAM backhaul in response to 4G and residential broadband initiatives.

Total Access^® 1424S-CE Carrier Ethernet Access Gateway for remote offices.
- Extending both 10 and 100Mbps Ethernet services to far-flung branch offices.

The Total Access 5000 is now capable of supporting 5,376 GPON subscribers and 504 Active Ethernet subscribers per chassis. ADTRAN has also added a new family of universe ONTs which provide auto-sensing support for both Active Ethernet and GPON.

I will likely hear more about both these products at Metaswitch Forum in Vegas next week.

Optimum Lightpath connects with CENX carrier Ethernet exchange

Doug Mohney — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 02:47:07 +0000

Optimum Lightpath (www.optimumlightpath.com) has connected to CENX’s New York exchange.

The move allows Optimum to connect/reach more than 10 million Ethernet service locations worldwide, enabling Optimum’s customers to establish Ethernet-based low-latency and high-bandwidth connections between the New York metro area and key locations around the world.

Needless to say, Optimum has a lot of financial service customers it wants to give love, er good connectivity.

ADTRAN in pictures – Part 1 – Welcome and Introduction to UC

Doug Mohney — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:55:12 +0000

WARNING: Some of the pictures below are pretty big and might freak out your browser and/or cause slow load times for this page.

Last week, I and about 26 other analysts and media were in Huntsville, Alabama as guests of ADTRAN. The company was making its introductory launch of a unified communications (UC) software solution — a big step off the company’s traditional path of making telecommunications equipment such as switches, routers, and multi-service access solutions…more about that later.

Southern hospitality is the rule in Huntsville, so there’s a welcoming bag in the hotel room.

Inside the bag are samples of the area’s cultural touchstones–

Gotta love folks who provides you with Jack and coke upon check in, along with a Moon Pie, freeze-dried ice cream, and one of those Cracker Barrel triangle/golf tee games.

Our “home” for the next two days was ADTRAN’s Mark C. Smith Conference Center. People may recall that Smith also has a conference room named after him over at Digium.

Smith, the founder of ADTRAN, is still revered at the company and the values he established for running and operating the business are still in strong force.

ADTRAN has a total of three high-rise buildings around a “lake” in the office park.

The picture above is taken from a window of the conference center. Inside those buildings are a bunch of testing labs, one of two assembly lines for products, and a secure storage area to put products before they are shipped out.

This is the third building, and the one where the conference center is. It also has a manufacturing line and a whole bunch of testing labs.

ADTRAN CEO Tom Stanton welcoming the goonies, er media to the Unify press event.

Why Unify? ADTRAN is layering unified communications upon its product offerings, moving up the food chain from infrastructure to IP PBXes to apps. Company execs admit they aren’t sure how the introduction of a software product is going to affect their channel partner relationships – a startling honest statement from the traditional “everything has its place” engineering culture.

Verizon Business VPN Ethernet service goes more global

Doug Mohney — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:36:07 +0000

Verizon Business has significantly expanded their Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), making it the Layer 2 Ethernet service available throughout its POPs in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America. Enterprise IT/LAN managers can now go control-freak crazy, provisioning offices around the globe with the same IP/Ethernet service, including implementing their own IP addresses and all sorts of other nifty things.

VPLS is a MPLS-based layer 2 VPN on top of the company’s Ethernet platform and is protocol independent, so customers retain complete control of their own routing. In a world of professional paranoia and fewer available IPv4 addresses, being able to run your own Ethernet and IP addressing is a Good Thing for simplified management and security purposes.

Since VPLS is MPLS-based, you get CoS — classes of services. An organization can customize priorities for different apps, so VoIP and video can get priority over email and other less latency-sensitive traffic. VPLS also allows customers to provision their network traffic from 1 Mbps to 1 GBps and beyond — a few customers have already made noises about 10 Gbps for linking data centers.

One point not emphasized in the press release but underlined in a media briefing is Verizon Business has carefully certified Ethernet providers in over 120 countries, so while the office in Argentina or Cape Town might not be next to a Verizon POP, the carrier has a “known good” business partner to provide Ethernet into its network for VPLS service; to repeat the cliche’ of the week – Verizon Business VPLS becomes the one “throat to choke” (a.k.a. single point of contact) for network connectivity.