NeoPhotonics(www.neophotonics.com) has announced what it claims is a significant expansion of its product line for high-capacity enterprise networks via the acquisition of BeamExpress Inc. BeamExpress offers a line of multimode transceivers for enterprise and storage applications. Based on CWDM technology, these products include 10-Gbit/sec LX4 X2 and LX4 XENPAK transceivers. The company can extend this technology to next-generation applications requiring 40-Gbit/sec data rates and beyond.
White Rock Networks (www.whiterock.com), which makes multiservice optical access, transport, and aggregation products for Ethernet and TDM service delivery, has suspended operations while it searches for a buyer. In an e-mail announcement entitled “White Rock Networks Suspends Most Operations,” the company’s board of directors says White Rock has decided to furlough “all but a skeleton staff of its U.S. employee team” while it looks into finding a buyer. “If not, White Rock will proceed to sell its key assets and wind the company down permanently,” the e-mail states.
Time Warner Telecom Inc. (www.twtelecom.com) has completed a 480-mile, DWDM SONET fiber ring that extends service from San Francisco, the East Bay, and Walnut Creek to the Silicon Valley cities of Palo Alto, San Jose, Santa Clara, and Sunnyvale. With this upgrade, the Equinix Internet Business Exchange (IBX) data center and Switch and Data’s PAIX data center now have fully redundant and dual-path access to Time Warner Telecom’s nationwide network.
EPON/GEPON equipment provider Alloptic (www.alloptic.com) has signed a reseller agreement with value-added partner ProCibernetica of Colombia as part of its continuing expansion into Central and Latin America. ProCibernetica serves Colombia and Ecuador with expertise in the telecommunications and data communications markets.
French alternative broadband provider Free, subsidiary of the Illiad Group (www.iliad.fr/en/), has announced a €1 billion FTTH rollout. As of the first half 2007, the group plans to offer its Parisian subscriber base access to its optical fiber network before progressively rolling the service out to certain towns in the suburbs and selected neighborhoods in provincial cities. More than 10 million French customers, representing more than 4 million connection points, will be eligible by 2012.
Russian telecommunications operator Golden Telecom (www.goldentelecom.com) has selected equipment from Nortel (www.nortel.com) for use in a next-generation optical network designed to provide both TDM and Ethernet transport and support various links between 2.5 and 10 Gbits/sec. The upgrade also prepares the Golden Telecom transport network for significant traffic growth in the future, providing an upgrade path to 40 Gbits/sec when required.
Teknovus (www.Teknovus.com), provider of GEPON/EPON chipsets, has announced penetration of more than 20 Chinese provinces and cities, including the major cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Wuhan, which represent three of China’s four largest municipalities. Other significant deployments include the province of Shanxi and the city of Fuzhou in the province of Fujian. Carrier wins include Beijing Netcom, Beijing Telecom, Shanghai Telecom, Wuhan Telecom, Hangzhou Telecom, Fuzhou Telecom, Shanxi Taiyuan Netcom, Shanxi Mobile, Yunnan Telecom, Guizhou Telecom, and Hubei Netcom.
Flag Telecom’s (www.flagtelecom.com) $400 million undersea cable system connecting 11 countries in the Middle East to India is now operational. The 11,859-km (7,370-mile) fiber network will carry data at a speed of 2.56 Tbits/sec. It stretches from Egypt to Oman and India and is linked to Flag’s global network.
OMRON Corp.(www.omron.com) has reached a preliminary agreement with NHK Spring Co. Ltd.to acquire NHK Spring’s FTTH optical coupler business. OMRON intends to combine NHK Spring’s quartz optical waveguide technology with its own stacked polymer optical waveguide technology to create new high-performance, cost-competitive products that will reinforce its product lineup and expand its business in the FTTH optical coupler market.Cortina Systems (www.cortina-systems.com) has acquired certain assets of Intel’s (www.intel.com) optical network components business for $115 million, which consists of a minority investment position and an undisclosed amount of cash. Included in the sale is a selection of Intel’s Ethernet media access controllers (MACs) and physical layer devices (PHYs), as well as its entire portfolio of transport and service framers, optical transport forward error correction (FEC) framers, and T1/E1 line interface products. Intel will retain ownership of its optical modules and transceiver products.
At its recent third-quarter meeting in Vancouver, the Optical Internetworking Forum (www.oiforum.com) debuted a major upgrade to StatEye, an open-source software package that is an integral part of the channel compliance methodology of the OIF’s Common Electrical Interface Specification (CEI). CEI defines specifications for serial signaling and channels in chip-to-chip and board-to-board applications up to 11 Gbits/sec. The StatEye upgrade enables it to handle crosstalk effectively and adds a useful graphical user interface (GUI) and an XML (Extensible Markup Language) framework.