- 5 June 2006 -

World's first compact 10Gbps widely tunable transponder

Two companies based in Petah Tikva, Israel, ECI Telecom and Civcom, announced the world's first compact 10Gbps widely tunable transponder designed to bring significant cost and performance benefits to both metropolitan area and long haul ROADM networks. Developed by Civcom and ECI, this new transponder will enable ECI's customers to reduce costs and experience performance benefits that full C-band tunable lasers provide for both metro and long-haul networks.

With the proliferation of triple play and business data applications, carriers can build their Optical Transport Networks (OTN), while saving spare-part costs and reducing total cost of ownership. The new transponder provides a new class of convenience and price points, delivering more network functionality for optical networks.

This full C-band widely tunable transponder dramatically cuts the total cost of ownership by reducing the number of transponder spare parts needed from 40/80 to one, as a single transponder can replace any working transponder in the commonly used ITU-T grid. It also remotely selects and changes the actual wavelength and, when combined with ECI's ROADMs, it easily provisions new wavelengths and enables the rerouting of existing ones for services such as traffic balancing and restoration.

Typically, WDM vendors offer widely tunable lasers only for long-haul systems, while the metro systems are limited to tunable lasers of up to 4/8 wavelengths. The unique compact size of this new module makes it ideal for metro networks, where compact size, modularity, and cost effectiveness are key. The Free-Light Compact Tunable Transponder (CTT) is a Long Reach - 80km, 40/80 channels, Widely Tunable Transponder specially designed and manufactured by Civcom and according to ECI's line card specifications. The transponder provides the ability to tune wavelengths through a single card and simplify network structure.

Designed for ECI's XDM® All Range(TM) WDM/ROADM system and part of ECI's OTN offerings, the highly compact transponder plugs into the XDM universal traffic card. This card is used for all transponder and combiner applications for both metro and long haul networks.

"This innovative solution demonstrates our technological development efforts to significantly reduce inventory costs and enables customers to remotely configure traffic in both metro and long haul networks. We are already receiving orders in large numbers and the feedback from our customers is extremely positive," said Eyal Shaked, Executive Vice President and General Manager of ECI Telecom's Optical Networks Division. "This is an important step in ECI's approach for one system to cover access to core next generation WDM/OTN networks."

"We are very pleased to partner with ECI to deliver this exciting new product," said Yair Itzhar, Sales & Marketing Vice President of Civcom. "This cooperation launched a new relationship between Civcom and ECI, stimulating new products and delivering great new choices for customers who want to technologically upgrade their optical networks while keeping within budget and footprint constraints."

The compact 10Gbps widely tunable transponder is available today, and complements the XDM's existing compact 2.5Gbps widely tunable transponder, which has been available since 2002 and also targets both Metro and Long-Haul networks.

ECI Telecom has successfully deployed of a turnkey triple-play network for one of the leading ISPs in Europe. This ISP, a subsidiary of one of the largest European carriers, has already deployed hundreds of thousands of high-speed, IPTV-ready ADSL lines. Deployment of additional lines is expected in the near future. ECI was chosen as the sole broadband access supplier for the network. The multi-year contract is valued at approximately $20m. The company was recently been listed in the 'Leaders' quadrant in Gartner's "Next-Generation Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) Equipment Magic Quadrant" for 2006.

Also in the news, ECI Telecom appointed Dr Niel Ransom to its Board of Directors. Until 2005, Ransom filled senior managerial positions at Alcatel. In his most recent position he served as its worldwide Chief Technology Officer as well as a member of Alcatel's Executive Committee.

In turn, Civcom, announced reduction in costs of its 10Gbps Ultra Long Reach (ULR) line of transponders to complement the market prices of Long Reach (LR) transponders. Civcom’s achievement to lowering development and production costs for ULR Transponders enables the market to bring faster into play the ULR technology. Another major achievement was the launch of its high-performance Free-Light Compact size long reach 10Gbps tunable transponder, which is the world’s smallest Widely Tunable Transponder. The Free-Light compact widely tunable transponder (measures only 3.34 x 2.87 x 0.53-in) provides the latest in optical data transport technology for DWDM applications.

www.civcom.com
www.ecitele.com