10 February 2003 -- THUS plc - which provides voice, data, Internet and call centre services to businesses in the UK under the THUS and Demon brands - has chosen Ciena Corp's ONLINE Edge Multiservice coarse wavelength division multiplexing (CWDM) platform to support its "City Ethernet" local area network (LAN) extension services.
The deal allows THUS to offer true carrier-class, metropolitan and national Ethernet services at Gigabit speeds to the enterprise market. Customers can now use either "National Ethernet" or "City Ethernet" products to reduce datacom costs and remove geographical barriers, to achieve greater flexibility and agility within their businesses, says THUS.
"City Ethernet" is a high-speed metro Ethernet service that allows enterprise customers to link sites through private Ethernet connections operating at the same high speed as their office network. "National Ethernet" is a high-speed national Ethernet offering that extends the benefits of "City Ethernet" to include flexible bandwidth and tariffs to meet all customer needs and budgets.
For most companies, when Ethernet traffic enters the leased-line wide area network (WAN) to travel to another office, it can slow to less than 10% of the LAN speed. Ciena's ONLINE Edge Platform takes advantage of CWDM technology to deliver low-cost, high-speed services including Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel and SDH services, to overcome this bandwidth bottleneck.
"Comprehensive performance monitoring features will give us high visibility of service delivery levels," said Phil Male, THUS' chief operating officer.
Ciena's compact and modular ONLINE Edge CWDM Platform delivers service transparency through intelligent CWDM optical technology combined with service aggregation and is designed for enterprises and service providers who want to offer high-bandwidth services over a single optical infrastructure.