CHICAGO, Illinois, (Supercomm 2005; Booth # 71037), - June 6, 2005 - Cisco Systems, Inc. today announced new deployments of the Cisco Reconfigurable Add/Drop Multiplexing (ROADM) solution to a wide variety of service provider customers. These deployments help enable service providers to expand their offerings to include services such as video on demand, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and storage area networking (SAN). The Cisco ROADM solution also helps customers to provision any wavelength, at any time, anywhere in the network, simplifying network maintenance and decreasing deployment time. Next generation DWDM customers have purchased 650 Cisco ROADMs globally since its launch in October of 2004.
ROADM technology, available on the Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform (MSTP), is a networking advancement that brings SONET-like manageability to metro DWDM. ROADMs enable service providers to add, drop or pass through any combination of the available wavelengths by remote control without having to deploy DWDM experts on site to manually configure or adjust node configurations.
Benefits of ROADMs include operational simplicity, flexibility and lower operational costs. They further allow service providers and cable multiservice operators to include Gigabit Ethernet and 10-Gigabit Ethernet anywhere in their networks. All currently installed Cisco ONS MSTP platforms are ROADM upgradeable.
"Cisco is the only vendor who could provide affordable ROADM technology to us in a 1200 kilometer, 17-node network," said Jim Fitzgerald, director of operations and engineering, EastLink. "ROADM has improved the operational simplicity and provisioning flexibility of our network. We can now add, drop or pass through any combination of the available wavelengths by remote control without having to deploy experts on site to manually configure or adjust node configurations. This reduces the likelihood of human errors caused when a technician needs to change the network configuration. It also minimizes the number of trips a technician needs to make to remote sites to recalibrate equipment. This system provides us with the capacity to enable new services as well as meet the increasing demands of our existing service portfolio."
The University of Wisconsin, acting as its own service provider, is utilizing the Cisco ROADM solution within its network to help researchers exchange vast amounts of data with other institutions around the world. "We're on a university budget and this solution saves us money by allowing us to turn up our own bandwidth when we need it," said Bill Jensen, senior network engineer, University of Wisconsin. "The Cisco ONS 15454 MSTP has been maturing for some time but with the advent of the ROADM cards, it helps us provision and manage the box with a high degree of effectiveness. There's a lot of information on each card, it's easy to configure, dynamically tune up and it's easy to see what is going on with each card on a regular basis."
Matt Roth, chief network architect at Veroxity Technology Partners added, "With our Cisco ONS 15454 MSTP already in place and the addition of Cisco's ROADM technology, we are able to dynamically configure, provision and rollout fiber channel Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet services across our global optical infrastructure, allowing for changing traffic patterns and providing the flexibility required when we need to make immediate changes in the network based on quickly changing customer traffic patterns."
For more information on all of Cisco's optical networking solutions, please visit: http://www.cisco/go/optical.
