Ciena Corp. (CIEN) announced Tuesday that ETC, a communications company serving residential and business customers in north Georgia, has deployed the CN 4200 FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform to add backbone capacity and the ability to offer advanced services via programmable ports.
ETC delivers a diverse portfolio of residential and business services, including broadband, cable TV, telephone, wireless phone and security systems. According to a press statement, ETC’s existing OC48 SONET network was nearing its capacity limit due to increasing network traffic and bandwidth demand from business customers. Rather than lay new fiber, ETC selected Ciena’s metro DWDM solution.
“After reviewing all of our options, Ciena stood out based on its reputation in optical service delivery and innovative OTN and programmable port technology, which gives us the flexibility to aggregate, switch and transport a variety of services to meet different customer needs,” said Stacy Pettit, network operations manager at ETC. “In addition, Ciena’s approach to integrating tunable 10G transponders with optical protection switching cost-effectively ensures our network resiliency, which is critical as we continue expanding to serve business customers with high-availability needs.”
Without disrupting an existing SONET service, ETC deployed Ciena’s CN 4200 to deliver 10 gigabit Ethernet services to multiple sites for several business customers across a fiber constrained route on its network. The operator also ensures continuous service delivery with protection against accidental fiber cuts from local construction or unforeseen natural events by leveraging CN 4200’s optical protection switching capability with sub-50ms failover capabilities.
As part of its ongoing effort to automate many of its service provisioning and network management tasks to maximize efficiency of its network operations team, ETC also deployed Ciena’s ON-Center Network and Service Management Suite. ON-Center includes tools such as auto discovery of the network topology and deployed elements, service setup and teardown, statistics collection and analysis, configuration backup and restoration, and node level diagnostics and configuration control.
