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BTI Systems touts Asian success

Metro optical transport platform provider BTI Systems has announced a pair of customer wins in Asia, one in Malaysia and the other in Vietnam.

In Malaysia, wholesale operator Fiberail has increased its deployment of BTI's Integrated Services Delivery Platforms -- specifically, the BTI 7000 Series -- to support mobile backhaul and Carrier Ethernet business services as well as "international interconnect" services to Thailand and Singapore. The deployment came as Fiberail expanded to provide metro Ethernet services to operators and financial service organizations, which complements the three fiber-optic networks Fiberall uses to deliver voice, data, and video capabilities countrywide. Fiberail has 5000 km of fiber-optic cable along the railways and gas pipeline corridor passing through almost all major towns in Malaysia.

The network now includes both the 7000 Series and 700 Series, which in particular enables Fiberail to supply end-to-end, low-latency mobile backhaul services.

"We continue to be impressed with BTI's solutions, as we build out our Mobile Backhaul and metro Ethernet capabilities," said a corporate spokesperson at Fiberail. "We chose BTI for this important network expansion as their solutions uniquely deliver very low latencies, interoperability with other vendors, and a cost-effective 'pay as we grow' approach. We are able to move quickly to leverage new opportunities as BTI's solutions are easy to deploy and scale, providing us with a strong competitive edge."

In Vietnam, Hanoi Telecom Corp. has selected BTI’s 700 Series with the proNX Service Manager to enable it to provide cost-effective, rapid delivery of Ethernet business services to its enterprise customers throughout the country. In partnership with Escom Co., Ltd, a value added distributor and solutions provider, Hanoi Telecom has integrated the 700 Series into its DWDM network to deploy its new metroE platform cost effectively, while accelerating the provisioning of Ethernet services to businesses from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City and across 25 other cities.

Afone focuses on telecom, payment, and security services for enterprises and retail businesses, and also functions as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) for enterprises and residential customers. It turned to Ekinops for a solution that would provide flexible, cost-effective, and reliable data center interconnection transporting SDH, Gigabit Ethernet, and Fibre Channel protocols.

The Ekinops 360 transport platform, with its T-Chip® (Transport on-a-Chip) technology, allows Afone to transport multiple protocols very efficiently, maximizing the use of fiber infrastructure.

The Ekinops 360 provides industry-leading economic efficiencies unmatched by other transport solutions in the market. In addition, the Ekinops 360 provides for a level of reliability far exceeding similar solutions.

PacketLight Networks says it now offers the first standards-based, 1RU 100G muxponder/transponder for metro and long-haul applications. The OIF-compliant PL-1000GM/GT aggregates multirate and multiprotocol 10G and 40G services into a 100G OTU4 uplink trunk.

PacketLight offers two 100-Gbps variants:

    A 100G muxponder for metro networks that reach up to 480 km.
    A 100G muxponder/transponder that can reach up to 2,500 km for ultra-long-haul networks.

Both configurations offer multirate transport capability and a smooth transition from 10G/40G to 100G client interfaces, PacketLight says. Both also can operate over existing 10G networks.
 
PacketLight integrates up to two optical amplifiers, mux/demux, and dispersion compensation modules if needed in the same 1U chassis. The PL-1000GM/GT integrates with PacketLight’s PL-2000 and PL-1000TN.

PL-1000GM/GT offers GFEC for standards-based G.709 100G forward error correction (FEC). Additionally, PL-1000GM/GT can be managed remotely via either in-band or out-of-band optical supervisory channel (OSC).

The new product benefits from PacketLight’s Web-based management tool and LightWatch NMS/EMS systems.

"100G technology has reached the maturity level where it has been standardized by the optical community. Therefore, today’s standards-based optical infrastructure offers no limitations and overcomes the interoperability issues,” stated Koby Reshef, PacketLight’s CEO. “At PacketLight, we identified two market segments which will adopt the 100G technology: metro networks and carrier long-haul. These segments have different requirements and challenges. We built solutions addressing both of the segment needs within the same footprint and under common NMS platform."

Author Stephen Hardy
Editorial Director and Associate Publisher

Ciena Corp. (NASDAQ: CIEN) reported revenue of $477.6 million for the second quarter of its fiscal 2012, ended April 30. And corporate management said they expect continued strength in the second half of the year.

Despite the strong revenue performance, the company still lost $27.8 million ($0.28 per common share) in the quarter on a GAAP basis. Still, Ciena’s performance showed marked improvement over the same quarter in 2011, when the company reported a GAAP net loss of $62.7 million ($0.66 per common share).

On a non-GAAP, basis, the company made $3.7 million ($0.04 per common share) during this year’s second quarter.

Gross margin declined sequentially during the quarter, to 38.3%, from 40.3% in 1Q12. The company blamed product mix and the delivery of new systems to new customers for the slippage.

Packet-optic transport system sales led the revenue charge, growing $51.7 million sequentially. Revenues from the CESD and services segments also rose sequentially. Together, these niches offset a sequential decline in sales of packet-optical switching systems such as the CoreDirector and the relatively new 5400 Reconfigurable Switching System.

As has become a common lament, CEO Gary Smith noted that economic turmoil in Europe continues to have an effect on equipment demand. However, he noted that the company has limited exposure to Southern Europe, where the region’s economic problems are most pronounced. He described demand from Ciena’s Northern European customers as “steady” during a conference call with analysts.

Smith and Senior Vice President, Finance and CFO James Moylan said they expect revenues for the current quarter, which ends July 31, to range between $455 million and $485 million. They also expressed confidence that the second half of the year will prove positive for the company, including for the currently lagging switching business. Smith says that the company has 19 customers (counting the 16-member SEA-ME-WE-4 consortium as a single customer) for the 5400 switching platforms, which the company unveiled in September 2009. As a point of comparison, Smith pointed out on the call that this number is already 50% that of the 12-year-old CoreDirector, the 5400’s predecessor.

[Correction] In addition to several Tier 1 customers among the SEA-ME-WE-4 consortium, Verizon has announced its plans to deploy the 5430 in its network (see “Verizon unveils new optical network strategy”) [Editor's Note: Lightwave had previously reported that Ciena had no Tier 1 deployments yet, which was an error.]

Ciena also has seen success with its WaveLogic processor-enabled coherent transport offerings. Vice President of Investor Relations Greg Lampf said that the company has 114 customers using its coherent technology. Interestingly, about 105 of them are using coherent technology to support 40-Gbps data rates. About 30 customers are transmitting 100-Gbps wavelengths. A number of customers are doing both, which explains why the total customer number is 114 and not 135.