Newsroom

Administración Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (ANTEL) has selected ZTE Corp. (H share stock code: 0763.HK / A share stock code: 000063.SZ) to provide equipment for a major GPON fiber to the home (FTTH) deployment in Uruguay.

ZTE will provide its ZXA10 C300 system to ANTEL, which is Uruguay’s largest fixed-line operator and mobile carrier. The new GPON project is a continuation of ANTEL’s initial deployment of ZTE GPON-based FTTx equipment in 2011 (see "ANTEL taps ZTE for GPON in Uruguay").

ANTEL plans to deploy a broadband network to support 100-Mbps services via a variety of architectures, including FTTH, fiber to the building (FTTB), and point-to-point backhaul, to more than 300,000 families and institutions across the country.
 
"We are honored to assist ANTEL with the GPON project deployment,” said ZTE Vice President Jiang Xiangyang. “Our innovative solutions and rich commercial experience will help ANTEL provide enhanced services to its users and maintain its leading position in Uruguay and Latin America.”

ADVA Optical Networking (FSE: ADV) says that VOO, a provider of cable television services to Belgium’s Brussels and Wallonia regions, has upgraded its ADVA FSP 3000 core optical network with ROADM technology.

Spanning over 2,500 km of fiber, VOO’s fiber-optic network consists of eleven 100G-capable core nodes and over 100 secondary optical nodes. VOO first selected ADVA's FSP 3000 for its network in 2009. The new ROADM infrastructure, implemented by the system integrator Arcadiz Telecom, interconnects content distribution networks and centralized transport platforms. The network now enables flexible service routing that reduces planning time, operational costs, and lead times when deploying business-to-business (B2B), mobile backhaul, and triple-play cable services.

“With over 1 million business and residential customers driving the demand for increased bandwidth and advanced services, VOO required a scalable and flexible end-to-end solution that allowed for fast provisioning of new services through the FSP Service Manager,” said Jos Vermeylen, managing director, Arcadiz Telecom. “The flexible ROADM network saves time and resources, enabling VOO to turn on its triple-play residential and B2B services with one simple click.”

“ROADM technology adds an unprecedented level of flexibility and scalability in the optical layer of this network,” added Yann Evain, sales director, BeNeLux, ADVA Optical Networking. “This flexibility is what enables customers like VOO to focus on growing its business and maintaining high customer satisfaction while having a network that simply works and supports future growth. We have worked closely with VOO for years to understand their needs. Arcadiz Telecom has been an invaluable part of the equation by providing continued design support, expertise and maintenance as the system integrator.”

Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR) has expanded its MX 3D Universal Edge Router product line with new platforms and applications.

On the hardware side, Juniper has unveiled two new MX 3D Universal Edge Routers. The larger of the two, the MX 2020 3D Universal Edge router, offers 80 Tbps of capacity; the other platform, the MX 2010, offers 40 Tbps. Both represent significant capacity jumps from Juniper’s previous top end, the 8.8 Tbps of the MX 960 – and, in the case of the MX 2020, a 67% capacity increase versus a single Cisco ASR 9922 router, the company points out. Juniper says the new routers have both the scale and applications horsepower to meet the requirements of the broadband edge, business edge, and mobile edge in the same platform. Meanwhile, the ability to support the same line cards as the other MX routers enables service providers to maximize both current and future investments, the company asserts.

The MX 2020 will be available in the fourth quarter of this year, while the MX 2010 will be available in the first quarter of 2013.

Meanwhile, the company has announced new applications for these and other MX routers. The JunosV App Engine, scheduled for availability in the fourth quarter of this year, is a hypervisor to for the company’s edge routers. It enables service providers to drag and drop existing applications as well as simultaneously operate applications from any vendor.

“In order for us to efficiently manage demand for greater bandwidth, latency-sensitive services and additional users, we needed more flexible and programmable architecture. Juniper’s innovative approach with the JunosV App Engine is a way for us to seamlessly create and simultaneously operate multiple applications on a single platform, reducing application migration time for future and new-generation Internet,” said Michihiro Aoki, research professor, National Institute of Informatics (NII), via a Juniper press release.

Meanwhile, the MX Virtual Chassis, which is currently shipping, virtualizes broadband or business edge services over multiple MX 3D routers; this enables service providers to operate the systems as a single chassis. The virtual chassis functionality speeds the addition of new subscribers while offering faster service provision, higher resiliency, and increased performance and scale, Juniper says.

The new Path Computational Element (PCE), also targeted for availability in the fourth quarter of this year, enables IT managers using the MX to find the most efficient paths to optimize on-demand bandwidth requirements. And the Juniper Rapid Deployment, a suite of services and software, supports simplified integration and testing with operating and business support systems (OSS/BSS).

“Our New Network vision is to provide innovations that help transform service providers into super providers,” said Rami Rahim senior vice president, Edge & Aggregation Business Unit, Juniper Networks, via the press release. “Thousands of MX customers have validated the need for massive scaling and reduced complexity driven by emerging video, applications, and cloud-based services. We see our new edge services engine as the first solution that truly empowers service providers to take control of their business by removing barriers currently hindering innovation and revenue expansion.”

“Our ability to build highly scalable networks to support streaming video adoption and complex business applications requires network innovators to deliver high-performance routers and improved operational efficiency. As network bandwidth and essential business application requirements continue to advance, Juniper's routing and software solutions empower us with the massive capacity headroom and carrier-grade features to methodically evolve our network with the new world of business," Kempei Fukuda, director, Network Services Division for NTT Communications, was quoted as saying in the same release.

“We predict that public IT cloud services spending will reach over $40 billion this year and almost $100 billion in 2016. This opportunity, coupled with streaming video and audio driving nearly half of the broadband traffic today and growing, will enable service providers to increase revenue if they capitalize now on the cloud, content, and mobility drivers,” according to Nav Chander, research manager, Telecom Business Services and Carrier Network infrastructure at IDC. “This new generation of edge routers optimized to enable virtualized data, voicec and video services from a single, scalable platform will enable providers to cost-effectively monetize their networks with new consumer and business services.”

Cisco has unveiled a pair of new technologies aimed at converging the IP and optical layers and enabling flexible provision of links carrying data rates of 100 Gbps and above. The new “elastic core architecture” enables multilayer service provisioning, while nLight technology integrates 100-Gbps optical interfaces into the Carrier Routing System (CRS). The advances are part of Cisco’s Open Network Environment (ONE) initiative.

Carriers have expressed an interest in converging the IP and optical layers, particularly in the long haul, to enable efficient mesh networking. Several systems providers have offered various takes on how this might be accomplished. Companies with a router heritage such as Cisco and Juniper suggesting the routers should control setup and other aspects of configuring optical links, while suppliers that are more optically focused have suggested that optical transport equipment should retain this responsibility.

Today’s release brings Cisco’s approach from theory to commercialization. With the help of the nLight capabilities, the elastic core approach within an IP over DWDM (IPoDWDM) architecture will provide a variety of benefits, the company asserts:

    Elastic scale: The Cisco CRS platform now has a more streamlined multi-chassis operational capabilities. With 400 Gbps per-slot, the architecture enables economical capacity scaling in-service.
    Elastic transport: The multi-layer management capabilities can enable carriers to reduce provisioning times “from months to minutes,” Cisco asserts, saying the result is savings as high as 36% on the total cost of ownership (TCO).
    Elastic services: Cisco CRS simultaneously supports transit label-switching (LSR) and IP services in a single system, which the company says means as much as 42% savings inTCO versus conventional technologies.

Meanwhile, nLight adds coherent 100-Gbps transport capabilities over 3,000 km without regeneration. The new capabilities likely are based on technology Cisco acquired when it bought CoreOptics.

Cisco says that CESNET, the national research and education network of the Czech Republic, is deploying the new nLight capabilities.

“CESNET is very happy to be the first customer to deploy Cisco’s nLight silicon, enabling 100 Gbps IPoDWDM in a production network,“ said Jan Gruntorád, managing director and member of the board of directors, CESNET, via a Cisco press release. "IPoDWDM is a very innovative technology that will serve as the foundation for our high-speed data services, while helping us reduce network costs and improve network operations. The Cisco CRS provides an intelligent core solution with the ability to scale up to 400 Gbps per slot, which will meet our service demands well into the future. The CRS enables reliable and continuous operation, as well as a very smooth migration path from the CRS-1 to the CRS-3 platform.“