By Mardi Balgochian Scalise, Lightwave Web Editor
APN Inc. (Quebec City, Quebec, Canada), an optical systems company, announced the launch of the APN-1008 at NFOEC 2001 in Baltimore this week. The APN-1008 is the first in a portfolio of the company's optical networking products based on optical CDMA (code division multiple access) technology.
This multi-rate (10 Mbps to 10 Gbps), multi-protocol (TDM, cell, packet), multi-topology (ring, mesh, bus, tree) product portfolio is designed to enable telecom service providers to cost effectively address the capacity and scalability constraints of their existing optical networks while preserving their current investments.
By combining inexpensive reliable sources with passive optics, APN avoids the complex and slow processing associated with electronic approaches. This enables service providers to add services efficiently while creating order-of-magnitude capacity gains in their current networks.
At NFOEC, the company also gave an informative presentation on photonic CDMA technology, citing that interest in optical code division multiple access (OCDMA) is at an all-time high, according to Habib Fathallah, Founder and CEO of APN. Fathallah states that this surge in OCDMA awareness is due, in no small part, to the tremendous demand for Internet services, including high-bandwidth services like electronic commerce, virtual-reality and video-on-demand.
OCDMA addresses these carrier challenges because the technology leverages carriers' existing investment, allows faster deployment of services and provides the carrier with a clear differentiation from competitors. APN's optical architecture is an approach that allows increased bandwidth and new services while costing the carrier less money. OCDMA is the key enabler of that approach, and is compatible with conventional WDM systems.
APN's OCDMA technology is available now.