29 January 2004 State College, PA Lightwave -- Cable Bahamas Ltd. has selected C-COR.net Corp.'s FTTmaX platform for a field trial of Fiber-to-the-Premise (FTTP) technology supporting voice, video, and data services to its Bahamian subscribers. C-COR equipment initially deployed in January 2004 includes an FTTmaX headend for the operator's central office (CO) and optical network units (ONUs) that are deployed in the home or business.
"Cable Bahamas has been using fiber extensively for many years and provides a fully functional two-way network delivering video and high-speed data services," reports André Foster, vice president of Information Technology at Cable Bahamas. "Deploying a customer premise device that can deliver the triple play of services--voice, video, and data--over a single strand of fiber on a passive network has always been Cable Bahamas' vision. We are excited about working with C-COR to test and deploy this technology," he adds.
C-COR's FTTmaX is an end-to-end fiber solution that leverages C-COR's optical transport equipment and element management systems, Passive Optical Network (PON) technology, and Gigabit connectivity to provide high-capacity bandwidth as well as a simpler, more efficient, and less expensive network access for transporting voice, video, and data to the home or business over fiber-optic networks. The FTTmaX system uses a PON approach to address the last mile of the communications infrastructure from the service provider's CO or headend directly into business or customer locations, a local loop that is currently a bandwidth bottleneck between metro-core systems and the end user.
By sending point-to-multipoint signals through a distributed topology of fiber-optic cables and passive splitters, PON technology taps into the higher-bandwidth capacity of fiber for the local loop, while using passive devices to eliminate the maintenance and installation costs of active electronics. FTTmaX has potential applications for a variety of service providers seeking revenue opportunities from new subscriber services while holding the line on costs, including MSOs, incumbent local-exchange carriers (ILECs), competitive local-exchange carriers (CLECs), overbuilders, municipalities, independent home builders, and utilities.