ADTRAN Introduces New Optical Transceivers, Expands ProCloud Subscription Services

HUNTSVILLE, AL — ADTRAN, a provider of next-generation open networking solutions, announced its first Subscriber Edge Tunable (SET) optical transceivers. ADTRAN’s entry into this new category of tunable optics addresses several key technology and innovation gaps that have hindered market development for multi-wavelength access networks. SET optics will be a key enabling technology for ADTRAN’s NG-PON2 solution, facilitating the delivery of highly elastic fiber services right to the customer premises equipment (CPE). Developed by ADTRAN Labs, this most recent innovation will enable access providers to cost-effectively and efficiently leverage Nx10G NG-PON2 to deliver even higher speed FTTH services to homes and business.

SET optics provide an essential building block for the wavelength agile access network of the future, providing the dynamic network capabilities needed to underpin the provider’s creation and deployment of user-driven service delivery models. By providing fast wavelength switching times and access-friendly cost points, SET optics will remove the operational and economic sensitivities that have previously limited tunable optics to transport applications. When paired with software-defined access to allow dynamic control, SET optics and NG-PON2 provide a highly dynamic physical layer to extend the programmable network to optical levels.

“With our new SET optical transceivers, ADTRAN Labs is addressing the most significant challenge for the economics of NG-PON2 deployments. The future value of the dynamic and extensible capabilities of NG-PON2 are unmatched and will serve the needs of access network providers worldwide for many years,” said Kevin Schneider, ADTRAN’s chief technology officer. “The capability to design our own optical transceivers allows ADTRAN Labs to focus on the needs of our customers and bring innovative enabling technology to market to enable their business cases.”

Adding Capacity on the Fly — As Internet traffic levels rise and service providers look to support business and enterprise services over a unified access network, the ability to add capacity on the fly has become a network imperative. The multi-wavelength capability of NG-PON2, enabled by SET optics, helps access network operators pull more capacity out of their existing fiber access plants, providing a dispatch-free upgrade path when the existing PON capacity has become exhausted. Additionally, combining SDN-enabled capacity management with ADTRAN’s SET optics’ sub-50ms wavelength switchover times enables NG-PON2 networks to ensure the highest level of application quality of experience in a user-defined service structure and deliver resilient, SLA-based services. These benefits are realized by allowing the automatic offload of traffic from congested or out of service wavelengths and OLT ports to alternative wavelengths on less utilized network assets.

“Today, service providers are looking for highly scalable, programmable service delivery models. It is imperative that their current fiber network investment cost-effectively supports the next wave of multi-gigabit growth spurred by emerging user-driven services and applications,” said Julie Kunstler, principal analyst at Ovum. “ADTRAN’s subscriber edge tunable optics solution supports the cost-efficient expansion and unbundling of the FTTx architecture, accelerating the rollout of 10G residential and 10G and beyond enterprise services through disruptive ONT and CPE pricing.”

SET optics is one of several optical technology choices in ADTRAN’s unique access portfolio, providing flexible optics possibilities, including both fixed-wavelength and SET options for 10G ONUs to meet the needs of all access network operators.

ADTRAN Expands ProCloud Subscription Services
ADTRAN also announced the expansion of its ProCloud Subscription Services with the addition of its Gigabit routers, IP business gateways and Session Border Controllers (SBCs), increasing its cloud-managed services portfolio to offer affordable rental of carrier-class equipment and associated managed services. ProCloud Subscription Services empowers Managed Service Providers (MSPs) with the industry’s widest range of wired and wireless managed voice and data services to support network demands, whether for businesses, government or other enterprise organizations. ADTRAN’s MSP partners can now easily deliver and scale business-class hosted VoIP services to support their customers’ ability to compete in today’s global, data-driven marketplace while generating new revenue streams for their own business.

“The addition of voice and data solutions to ADTRAN’s ProCloud Subscription Services presents us with a truly robust service offering, one that advances our ability to manage across all wired and wireless network needs for our customers and support the bandwidth, devices, cloud applications and high-quality voice services they need to succeed,” said Mark Machan, division manager, VIP Voice Services. “The subscription services approach continues to reinforce a real partnership with our customers—we can quickly turn up new cloud-managed services and provide them the ability to offload time-consuming network management activities to us.”

Streamlining Customer Service Introduction, Management and Upgrades
Developed to address the flood of data services flowing into the enterprise and mitigate the resulting IT challenges, ADTRAN’s ProCloud Subscription Services provides MSPs with a unique set of tools to grow their business by streamlining service introduction, management and upgrades for current and new customers. The newly added voice and data solutions also enable MSPs to meet the new standard of gigabit broadband necessary to support increasing bandwidth demands and a more expansive set of end users, as well as achieve high-quality voice services. ADTRAN’s voice quality monitoring helps MSPs ensure they deliver high quality-of-service to the end user while providing granular analytics to manage that service.

“ADTRAN continues to drive innovation into its solutions portfolio in order to meet the needs and demands of our customers, and the latest advancement of our ProCloud Subscription Services portfolio is a direct reflection of that. Our monthly subscription portfolio is unmatched in offering such a wide variety of wired and wireless networking solutions on one platform,” said Meggin Sawyer, VP, business solutions and cloud services, ADTRAN. “We will continue to expand this unique service offering to meet the needs of future networking demands and further help MSPs drive new revenue streams.”