FEBRUARY 21, 2007 By Meghan Fuller -- ADVA Optical Networking (search for ADVA Optical Networking) has been named a supplier of Ethernet last mile access products in British Telecom's 21st Century Network (search for 21CN). The carrier will deploy the ADVA FSP 150 as the Network Termination Equipment (NTE) to interconnect all end customers, carriers' carriers, and BT facilities.
"Essentially, every type of Ethernet service, starting at 1 Mbit/sec all the way up through Gigabit-type applications, that is delivered to a customer premise will be deployed using an FSP 150 as a demarcation or extension solution," explains Brian McCann, chief marketing and strategy officer at ADVA Optical Networking.
According to ADVA, BT's request for proposal (RFP) included separate requirements for BT Global Services, BT OpenReach, and BT Wholesale, and ADVA's FSP 150 won all three.
For the OpenReach business, which is BT's carriers' carrier services initiative, the FSP 150 enables BT to interconnect different providers across its fiber infrastructure with a fully terminated Ethernet service. In other words, all carriers--including BT itself--will purchase Ethernet managed services using ADVA's service demarcation as the definition.
The BT Global Services piece is where a BT core network is interconnected across a pan-European or global basis to other networks around the world. "What you see here is essentially the FSP 150 is used as a demarcation solution every time an Ethernet service is deployed by BT, regardless of whether it's on the MSAN or Layer 2 switched Ethernet," says McCann.
BT's existing MSAN or multiservice access node vendors include Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe Ltd. (FTEL) and Huawei. More recently, the carrier announced Nortel and Siemens as Layer 2 switch vendors. ADVA says it will provide the demarcation for all of them.
For his part, McCann believes the FSP 150's (search for FSP 150) flexibility is a key reason it was chosen for the 21CN deployment. In particular, the FSP 150 actively supports all the protocols required for next-generation Ethernet service delivery, including Provider Backbone Transport (PBT), Provider Backbone Bridging-Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE), and T-MPLS (which BT does not support.)
ADVA is also providing its network management software, which will be integrated with BT's operational support system (OSS) to provide end-to-end service provisioning and management, says McCann. He reports that the software integration portion of the contract win is currently underway. As a result, volume rollouts of the FSP 150 devices will not occur until the second half of this year.
McCann credits the Covaro Networks acquisition (see "ADVA Optical Networking acquires Covaro Networks") in part for the BT win. The FSP 150, featuring Etherjack technology from Covaro, provides Ethernet demarcation, extension, and aggregation, enabling BT to monitor its network--from the core to the customer premises--and remotely respond to faults, thereby minimizing the need for manual intervention. Such functionality is critical for BT as it begins to offer bandwidth-intensive applications like IPTV, voice-over-IP (VoIP), and triple-play services to a wider market of business and residential customers.