Ciena's 5171 was designed to elevate cable operators end-customers' experience by bringing capacity closer to the edge. The open, ultra-dense coherent networking platform for street-level cabinets offers ease of operation and ultra-low industrial temperature power consumption. Its density, scale and capacity enable dramatic reduction in space, which drives down energy, switching and transport costs while increasing their competitive differentiation, the company asserts.

Judge's Comment: "As operators move to a distributed architecture field aggregation is going to be a challenge. Having options for deploying aggregation switches is important to the success of DAA."