SPW&L Telecom upgrades municipal fiber-optic network with Ciena’s Carrier Ethernet Service Delivery platforms
MARCH 10, 2010 - Ciena Corp. announced that Sun Prairie Water & Light (SPW&L), a municipal utility company based in Sun Prairie, Wis., has deployed its Carrier Ethernet Service Delivery (CESD) platforms to upgrade the service delivery capabilities of the utility’s fiber optic network throughout its serving area.
The network is run by the utility’s communication services division, SPW&L Telecom, and is already connecting all 12 locations of the Sun Prairie School District, multiple locations for WPPI Energy, Brooks Tractor, Laker Software, and other business customers, as well as providing the communications infrastructure for the utility’s smart water grid.
SPW&L Telecom offers a variety of point-to-point and point-to-multipoint wide area network and Internet connections over the network that combine traditional carrier services with Ethernet.
SPW&L Telecom’s network was designed and is managed on a 24x7 basis by its long-time partner, INOC, a global provider of outsourced network operations center (NOC) monitoring and reporting services. With a primary NOC in Madison, Wis., and a disaster recovery NOC near Chicago, Ill., INOC specializes in managing fiber-optic networks to ensure security, performance, and availability to meet the strict service level agreements between service providers and their end customers.
In addition to its education and business customers, SPW&L’s water utility division has deployed Ciena’s CESD platforms at its water towers, well houses, and reservoirs as the communications infrastructure for its new Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system for intelligently monitoring and managing its water distribution facilities. By leveraging its own fiber network and fast, reliable Gigabit Ethernet connections, the utility was able to eliminate the cost and inefficiency of its old solution that required patching together leased lines from the local telephone company. SPW&L plans to implement a similar solution for its electricity facilities next year.
SPW&L Telecom consulted with INOC about upgrading the fiber network in order to add greater bandwidth capacity, reliability, and traffic management to the network it originally deployed in 1999.
Deployed by more than 100 customers worldwide, Ciena’s CESD portfolio is a family of service delivery and aggregation platforms that address a wide range of application, service, market, and access technology requirements. The CESD products deployed in the SPW&L Telecom network include the CN 5305 Service Aggregation Switch and CN 3920, CN 3940, and CN 3960 Service Delivery Switches.