ECOC 2006 Round Up

In September Polatis attended Europe’s largest Optical Communication exhibition conference, ECOC (European Conference and exhibition on Optical Communication). It was held at the Palais des Festival in Cannes, France. Polatis would like thank all those who visited the Polatis booth, and made our show a tremendous success. 

In September Polatis attended Europe’s largest Optical Communication exhibition conference, ECOC (European Conference and exhibition on Optical Communication). It was held at the Palais des Festival in Cannes, France. Polatis would like thank all those who visited the Polatis booth, and made our show a tremendous success.

Polatis’ broad range of high performance optical switch products were displayed in several live product demonstrations focused across our diverse customer base, for users in the Government/Defense systems, instrumentation & test, and telecommunication networking segments. 

Instrumentation & Test
The Instrumentation and test demonstration was set up as a product verification test station using Polatis 16x16 VOA Optical Switch Tray (VST). The VST is the first of its kind, featuring a fully integrated, ultra-low loss optical matrix switch with per-port variable optical attenuation and calibrated power monitors in one compact package. Port sizes include 4x4 through 32x32, and options for the powerful user-assignable port asymmetry feature.

The Polatis High Port Asymmetric (HPA) Optical Switch was configured in a realistic network monitoring scenario, demonstrating tapped optical monitoring, introducing a fiber break, OTDR fault location and the restoration of service.

Network Switching and Reconfiguration
Polatis’ network protection demonstration was a main feature on the booth. It effectively demonstrates that not only can fiber faults be detected locally, but that automatic switching to an available protection path from a shared pool of dark fiber routes can maintain connection. Exact pre-defined protection paths are not necessary.

This method of network protection can bring many benefits; diversity of pre-provisioned dark fiber protection routes, protection against multiple network fiber faults and multiple working lines sharing the pool of protection paths. In addition the protection switching can be very fast, enabling rapid network reconfiguration. This is made possible by the following key features, Firstly, faults are detected directly in the switching hardware, secondly, there is no need for communication between nodes or intervention of the higher-level network control to instigate protection and finally, switching only needs to occur at the ends of the defined fiber path. 

Polatis also demonstrated many of its established product range, including its OSM (Optical Switch Module) products, available in both hermetic and non-hermetic configurations, and its Optical Switch Blade (OSB) range which includes the world’s first optical matrix switch card, based on the compact PCI (cPCI) standard. In addition to the OSM and OSB product lines, Polatis showed its widely deployed Optical Switch Tray (OST) that is available in 4x4 to 32x32 sizes with user-assignable port asymmetry.  Both the single mode and multimode configurations were demonstrated.

With demonstrations of 8 unique products in diverse market areas, Polatis continues to demonstrate its world leading position in all-optical switching. The breadth of the Polatis product line continues to grow as it expands into new markets. Many of these demonstrations will be displayed at the forth-coming OFC/NFOEC 2007 exhibition, Anaheim, June 4th-6th. If you would like any information regarding the demonstrations detailed in this article, ECOC of the forth coming OFC/NFOEC please contact us. 

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