16 December 2002 -- Developer of carrier-class wavelength networking equipment Meriton Networks, Ottawa, Canada (www.meriton.com), today announced that it has secured additional funding of USD17m in equity and debt.
VenGrowth Capital Partners Inc. led this Series B round and VenGrowth general partner Dr. Mark Janoska becomes a member of the board of directors of Meriton Networks. VenGrowth was joined in the round by existing investors Desjardins Venture Capital Group, Newbury Ventures, Primaxis Technology Ventures, RBC Capital Partners (Telecommunications Fund), Sierra Ventures, Venture Coaches and VentureLink Fund.
The funding will be used to support the product trials now underway by telecommunication carriers, as well as expand into new markets. The company has recently opened operations in Asia, and is quickly building sales and distribution channels to serve this important market.
"We are pleased with the substantial customer and partner traction that we have secured," said Mike Gassewitz, president of Meriton Networks. "Carriers love the dual-purpose nature of the product. The 7200 OADX is more cost effective than deploying Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer (OADMs) for adding capacity to exhausted networks; and with its networking capabilities, the OADX is also ideal for enabling managed wavelength services - an important new source of revenue for carriers."
In its report entitled The Market for Bandwidth Services industry analysts Communications Industry Researchers predict that wavelength services revenues will grow to USD1.125bn by 2006.
"As demand for high-speed connections grows, wavelength services will be an increasingly important source of revenue for carriers," said David Gross, senior optical analyst with CIR. "Meriton allows providers to offer wavelengths more efficiently by combining switching and transmission in a single network element."
More and more carriers are seeking alternatives to OADMs to overcome deployment issues regarding cost, scalability, link engineering, power balancing, and ring interconnection. The 7200 OADX is a new type of metro networking equipment that enables carriers to add capacity while reducing costs and simplifying operations.
As a transparent integrated switching and transport system, the 7200 OADX meets the growing demand for high bandwidth services such as OC-n/SDH services, wavelengths, optical Ethernet, SANs and other data services using the same ports and facilities.