5 September 2003 Quebec City, Canada Lightwave -- EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering Inc. has unveiled a Network Testing Application optimized for carriers commissioning and turning up new services on multi-service provisioning platforms (MSPPs).
The EXFO claims the application is the first test to be optimized for the emerging MSPP market. As part of the EPX test system, this application leverages EXFO's EPX6000 2.5+ Gigabit Multi-Rate Transceiver to simultaneously exercise the entire channelized bandwidth of an MSPP grooming node (also called "deep channelization testing"). The new independent path control feature of the EPX6000 allows simultaneous tests to be run independently on each channel embedded within a SONET trunk signal. Additionally, the support of emerging concatenated channel types -- such as STS-6c, STS-9c, and STS-24c -- makes the test application ready for next-generation SONET services like Ethernet-over-SONET (EoS) carried across MSPP networks.
New features of the EPX6000 2.5+ Gigabit Multi-Rate Transceiver also include independent transmit sequencing and receive capture of transport overhead bytes as well as variable transport overhead byte delay to emulate long lengths of fiber. These features are valuable for thorough verification testing of MSPP network elements. Beyond its multi-rate ability to operate at OC-3 (155 Mbits/sec), OC-12 (622 Mbits/sec), and OC-48 (2.5 Gbits/sec), the EPX6000 module can also be complemented by the EPX6100 module upgrade to provide the same level of deep channelization but at OC-192 (10 Gbits/sec).