JANUARY 5, 2010 -- ETC, a communications company serving residential and business customers in northern Georgia, has deployed Ciena's CN 4200 FlexSelect advanced services platform to upgrade its backbone network with additional capacity, optical protection switching for resiliency against accidental fiber cuts, and the ability to offer SONET, Ethernet, storage, and digital video services via programmable ports.
ETC delivers residential and business services, including broadband, cable TV, telephone, wireless phone, and security systems. With the overall volume of network traffic increasing and business customers eager for higher-bandwidth services, ETC's existing OC-48 SONET network was nearing its capacity limit. Rather than incur the time, cost, and community disruption of laying new fiber, ETC addressed its fiber exhaustion using flexible, metro DWDM equipment from Ciena.
"After reviewing all of our options, Ciena stood out based on its reputation in optical service delivery and innovative OTN and programmable port technology, which gives us the flexibility to aggregate, switch, and transport a variety of services to meet different customer needs," says Stacy Pettit, network operations manager at ETC. "In addition, Ciena's approach to integrating tunable 10G transponders with optical protection switching cost-effectively ensures our network resiliency, which is critical as we continue expanding to serve business customers with high-availability needs."
Without disrupting an existing SONET service, ETC deployed Ciena's CN 4200 to deliver 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) services to multiple sites for several business customers across a fiber-constrained route on its network. The operator also ensures continuous service delivery with protection against accidental fiber cuts from local construction or unforeseen natural events by leveraging CN 4200's optical protection switching capability with sub-50-ms failover capabilities. The platform enables ETC to grow its network capacity and services without cost-prohibitive initial investment by adding new channels, OTN service transparency, and mapping any service to any port.
"The need for more bandwidth and service continuity is universal -- it-s not just a concern for operators and customers located in major metropolitan markets," comments Mike Aquino, senior vice president, global field operations at Ciena. "ETC's deployment highlights the benefits of CN 4200's innovative features and architecture, including upgrading the network without disrupting the existing SONET services, line cards that can be programmed to support different services to reduce sparing costs' and the ability to add network capacity in increments."
As part of its on-going effort to automate many of its service provisioning and network management tasks to maximize efficiency of its network operations team, ETC also deployed Ciena's ON-Center network and service management suite. ON-Center includes tools such as auto-discovery of the network topology and deployed elements, service setup and teardown, statistics collection and analysis, configuration backup and restoration, and node-level diagnostics and configuration control.
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