Hannover, GERMANY - Feb. 26, 2000 -- Cisco Systems, Inc., the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet, today announced the availability of the Cisco ONS 15304 optical transport extender, the first Internet scale, carrier class platform to extend optical transport to the customer premises. The ONS 15304 delivers New World Services and economics on existing SDH infrastructures, thereby lowering initial deployment and operating costs for service providers.

The capabilities and reduced costs make the Cisco ONS 15304 are optimized for Alternative Service Providers (ASP), Public Telephone & Telegraph (PTT) and cable companies. The Cisco ONS 15304 is a carrier class SDH access device that combines data-intensive elements of Cisco IOS. software with the ring access capabilities of a SDH Add/Drop multiplexer(ADM) in an integrated platform for "fiber to the building" applications.

"The ONS 15304 demonstrates Cisco's continued commitment to the New World vision of data and voice conversion into a single network," said John Doyle, Chief Technology Officer, Service Providers, EMEA. "The system enables carriers to offer their customers Internet scale, carrier class data and voice services today, without having to upgrade their existing transport network infrastructure. It eliminates the need for overlay networks by fusing both fail-safe data, and TDM over fiber services into a single SDH platform, thus reducing the costs to deploy and manage these networks."

The ONS15304 features eight E1 and eight 10Base-T Ethernet ports on a fully redundant platform with no single point of failure, including processor, E1, Ethernet and STM-1 interfaces. The system allows users to offer bandwidth-scalable data services and E1 private-line delivery over an existing SDH infrastructure. The ONS 15304 supports a full suite of SDH, PDH, and Ethernet performance monitoring and alarming, complete with system auto-provisioning to provide fast and easy system turn-up.

The Cisco ONS 15304 takes the place of two existing platforms required for SDH ring access and delivery of data-based services, and does not require an upgrade of the existing SDH-based network infrastructure. The Cisco Transport Manager (CTM) is an element management system based upon the TMN model and supports multiple ONS 15304 systems within an OSS network domain.

Using the capabilities of the Cisco ONS 15304, service providers can now target small to medium-sized businesses in multi-tenant building environments, previously viewed as being too costly because of the use of the traditional ADM-based service delivery.

Availability

The Cisco ONS 15304 is available starting February 24, 2000.