Setting the stage for an upcoming series of customer announcements, a source at ADTRAN, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADTN) tells Lightwave that increasing success with Tier 3 carrier fiber to the home (FTTH) deployments has helped drive network access market share growth of 136 percent for the company’s flagship Total Access 5000 multiservice access and aggregation platform. And broadband stimulus funding is only part of the reason.
Gary Bolton, ADTRAN’s vice president of global marketing, said in an interview today that because Tier 3 carriers generally don’t use as broad a range of network topologies or have as diverse a set of customer densities as their larger Tier 1 and 2 counterparts, they tend to focus initially on only a few applications when evaluating equipment. However, these applications can vary widely; ADTRAN has identified 13 of them, with broadband access, mobile backhaul, and Carrier Ethernet business services support among them.
Equipment designed for Tier 3 carriers therefore must provide best-in-class performance across a wide range of feature sets, Bolton asserted. This proves important not only to meet initial requirements but also to take advantage of opportunities the carriers initially don’t anticipate, he added.
Bolton said that while broadband stimulus funding has sparked some new FTTH-related sales (see “NTELOS selects ADTRAN Total Access 5000 for broadband stimulus FTTH” as an example), the need to anticipate the transition of the Universal Service Fund to broadband access applications also has driven Tier 3 carrier interest in broadband network upgrades. Merger and acquisition activity, such as ADTRAN customer Frontier Communications’ purchase of networks from Verizon, can lead carriers to buy new equipment as they upgrade recently acquired infrastructure as well, Bolton pointed out.
The Total Access 5000 supports a variety of xDSL technologies as well as GPON and Active Ethernet. The company last year announced a proprietary approach to fiber to the node called Ultra Broadband Ethernet (UBE; see “ADTRAN unveils Ultra Broadband Ethernet access architecture”). The technology, which uses an FTTH optical network unit as a node from which Ethernet-enabled services can run over copper to serve eight homes, is now in customer trials with three Tier 1 carriers, Bolton revealed. He declined to say when the technology would be ready for commercial deployment.
Bolton also said ADTRAN has seen traction for its packet optical transport system capabilities, designed for traffic aggregation among other uses (see “ADTRAN joins packet optical transport race with Optical Networking Edge family”). He added that customer announcements for the packet optical transport features are upcoming.
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