JANUARY 17, 2008 -- Cisco (search for Cisco) today announced that Shanghai's Oriental Cable Network Co. Ltd. has selected the Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform (MSTP) and reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (search for ROADM) technology for its digital television optical transport platform. Oriental Cable, the world's largest cable television city network, becomes the first network service provider in mainland China to deploy ROADM technology, say Cisco representatives.
According to the company, ROADM is a part of its Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network (IP NGN), which enables providers such as Oriental Cable to migrate to IP-based networks. By adopting Cisco IP NGN, Oriental Cable can deliver new services to end users more quickly. Oriental Cable can also improve its operational efficiencies and capital expenditures while advancing the network and service control necessary for long-term business success, claims Cisco.
The Oriental Cable next-generation network, aided by the Cisco ROADM, lays a solid foundation for completing the move from analog to digital television. Cisco representatives say the ROADM technology will help enable a more flexible transport of optical wavelengths on a single optical fiber through the dynamic reconfiguration of the traffic distribution in a DWDM network. This will increase the efficiency of Oriental Cable's existing fiber-optic network.
Oriental Cable, formerly known as Shanghai Cable Network, covers the entire city of Shanghai, broadcasting more than 60 channels to more than 3 million viewers. As the only company testing the delivery of voice, video, and data services over a single network in China, Oriental Cable has been upgrading through digitization of the existing cable network, thereby completing its transition from a traditional cable network provider to an Internet-era, fully integrated network service provider.
Cisco says the versatility of its ROADM technology enables Oriental Cable's customers to enjoy many more applications, such as multimedia digital broadcasting, high-speed Internet access, business networking, digital television, video conferencing, distance education, and real-time remote monitoring.
"The convergence of voice, video, data, and mobility networks with advanced communication devices presents a wonderful opportunity for Oriental Cable to upgrade to a fully application-flexible network," contends Wan Qianrong, vice president of Oriental Cable Network Co. "After careful review, we determined that the best way to transition to these next-generation broadband services would be to migrate to a Cisco optical network, which is best suited to support our increasing IP traffic volume."
ROADM technology, available on the Cisco ONS 15454 MSTP, is a networking advancement that brings a level of management simplicity typically associated with an SDH or SONET network to DWDM networks. Each Cisco ROADM-enabled node in Oriental Cable's network is able to add, drop, or pass through any combination of the available wavelengths by remote control without having to deploy a DWDM expert to each interim site to manually adjust equipment configurations. As a result, says Cisco, its ROADM deployment offers Oriental Cable operational simplicity, flexibility, and lower operational costs.
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