MAY 2, 2007 -- THUS plc has chosen Ciena Corp.'s (search for Ciena) CN 4200 FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform to support the delivery of a new high-capacity, next-generation network to the London Metropolitan Network (LMN).
The network will connect 137 higher and further education sites across Greater London and offer 20-Gbit/sec capacity to meet the growing demand from educational institutions for higher bandwidth.
As the capital's metropolitan research and education network, the LMN provides more than one million students with access to advanced services and online learning applications and also connects member institutions to JANET, the UK's research and academic network.
Ciena's CN 4200 platform will be used to interconnect LMN's three major points of presence (PoPs), namely the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC), Imperial College, and Kings College Waterloo Campus, providing two optical transmission wavelengths between each site. Each wavelength will deliver 10 Gbits/sec of capacity to support the unique requirements of the academic community, including bandwidth-intensive applications like video and remote data storage.Â
"We selected Ciena's CN 4200 platform because it provides us with a resilient and flexible DWDM transport solution, allowing us to provision 10-Gbit/sec bandwidth on-demand and support any service type to meet the varying research needs of the LMN and its members," reports Phil Male, chief operating officer at THUS plc. "The platform allows us to provide a flexible network architecture for LMN that is easily scalable to support current and future network requirements."
A fourth network link will be deployed to provide Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) point-to-point connectivity between the ULCC and Queen Mary, University of London. THUS' networks also will interconnect to SuperJANET5, which links users across the UK's education community, and is also supported by Ciena's optical equipment.
"LMN joins the growing number of organizations within the research and education community that are taking advantage of next-generation technology," notes Francois Locoh-Donou, Ciena's vice president and general manager, EMEA. "THUS is using Ciena's unique solutions to deliver network flexibility, manageability and reliability to support the research and learning requirements of the education sector," he adds.
THUS has already built networks based on the CN 4200 platform for other enterprise customers. Additionally, THUS has deployed Ciena's next-generation platforms within its own UK-wide next-generation network.
The CN 4200 is a multiservice transport and service aggregation platform capable of supporting the migration to packet networks using future-ready technology such as ITU G.709 Optical Transport Network (OTN) for service transparency, dynamic wavelength routing featuring a hybrid ROADM solution, and remote service provisioning and management capabilities, say company representatives. (See "Optical platform provides software-enabled service provisioning").
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