January 14, 2003--Metrobility Optical Systems today announced that Local Access Communications, a competitive local-exchange carrier (CLEC) in Lewis County, Washington, is using its technology to deliver optical Ethernet for both high speed Internet access as well as metropolitan virtual local area networks (VLAN) to local businesses in the Centralia, Washington area.
Local Access is utilizing fiber deployed in their telephony network to provide broadband Ethernet services for Centralia's city government offices. The city contacted a variety of service providers when it realized that more and more of their applications were comprised of bandwidth intensive documents and required greater bandwidth both between their offices and to the Internet.
Jerry Whatley, president and CEO of Local Access Communications, noted that the choices were a costly 10-Mbit/sec connection from an ISP or optical Ethernet from Local Access. "Basically Local Access offered them a Fast Ethernet network at T1 prices ¿ that's 100 Mbits/sec at the same price as they would pay for a 1.54-Mbit/sec T1 line. The system has been running for a couple of months now and has been flawless," explains Whatley. Local Access is now reaching out to other cities in their service area to provide similar services to other clients who require higher speed connections such as ISPs, schools, and local universities.
The Local Access network has installed Metrobility's Radiance R5000 shelf which connects to the ATM network through a Cisco 8500. Individual sites utilize either the R5000 or standalone R400's for point-to-point connections. Metrobility's NetBeacon Element Manager allows Local Access to manage the optical links between their office and the remote sites.
"The individual site connections took about 2 weeks to extend fiber drops and less than an hour at each site to install and provision. We are utilizing Metrobility's single strand bi-directional wavelength multiplexing to maximize our fiber capacity," says Whatley.
Metrobility's Radiance technology delivers optical Ethernet in the first mile to the metro-access service provider market. The access line cards for the R400, R1000 and R5000 chassis enable WAN management features, such as remote loopback, integral optical power meter capability, real time quality of line monitoring, and bandwidth provisioning for optical Ethernet. The company's bi-directional wavelength multiplexing capabilities being used by Local Access enables companies to double their fiber capacity by utilizing two separate wavelengths to carry two distinct channels in different directions on a single strand of fiber. Metrobility is based in Merrimack, NH.