September 20, 2004 Martinsried/Munich, Germany and Mahwah, NJ--NetCologne, a regional carrier based in Cologne, Germany, has deployed ADVA's Fiber Service Platform (FSP) 1500 system. The FSP 1500 was installed to upgrade NetCologne's connection to DE-CIX, the central German Internet node in Frankfurt and the third-largest Internet node in Europe.
Awarded the title of "Regional Fixed Network Provider of the Year" four times since 1999, NetCologne is now able to meet demand from 128,000 Internet customers -including 60,000 DSL customers - for more bandwidth and greater transmission rates. NetCologne's enterprise customers can extend their Ethernet-based LANs across the metro and wide areas, seamlessly connecting multiple sites at native LAN speeds.
NetCologne had faced a dilemma: its existing SDH link from Cologne to Frankfurt was operating at near capacity and customer data volume continued to increase. The carrier's SDH link was unable to scale for delivery of Gigabit Ethernet speeds, necessitating a network upgrade. Earlier success with ADVA's FSP 2000 systems, which utilize WDM technology to multiplex and transport data, storage, voice, and video applications, made NetCologne again turn to ADVA's reseller partner CNT to help solve its upgrade requirements.
"We decided in favor of the FSP 1500 because it was the easiest way to expand our existing SDH infrastructure from Cologne to Frankfurt and forward Gigabit Ethernet signals via the SDH network. The commercial advantage lies, of course, in the investment protection for the existing equipment. We are transforming our TDM, circuit-oriented network and facilitating an incremental, affordable evolution to packet-oriented networking," said Stefan Förster, director, Access and Transmission at NetCologne. "Ethernet is the shark in the fishbowl. It's quickly becoming more popular for metropolitan- and wide-area-network connectivity and gradually forcing the conventional transmission technologies off the market."
The FSP 1500 is a next-generation SONET/SDH access system for the seamless aggregation of up to eight high-speed data, storage and video applications on a combined STM-16/OC-48 interface. Leveraging three new ITU-standard technologies - Generic Framing Protocol (GFP), Virtual Concatenation (VCAT) and Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS) - the FSP 1500 enables metropolitan service providers to leverage their existing SONET/SDH networks in introducing new high-bit-rate data services and continuing to support traditional voice services. The FSP 1500 is suitable for deployment in point-to-point, add/drop and ring topologies. The solution's small single-unit footprint and hot-swappable, small form-factor pluggable (SFP) optical interfaces enable service providers to more simply and flexibly evolve to customer application requirements.