Apr 7 2010
Enablence Technologies Inc. ("Enablence" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE:ENA), a leading supplier of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) equipment for triple-play residential and business services and optical components and subsystems for access, metro and long-haul markets, is working with Vianet Internet Solutions to bring superior HD television and the fastest Internet connectivity speeds available to the Greater Sudbury Area.
Over the past 15 years, Vianet has expanded across Ontario in markets of varying sizes to provide competitive local phone, Internet, data and hosting services to businesses and residents. To grow its addressable market and gain a competitive edge over other incumbent service providers, it is moving into the delivery of advanced triple-play services with state-of-the-art fiber to the home using Enablence's MAGNM Multi Media Aggregation Node, a fully distributed multi-service access platform purpose-built for high-speed broadband access and transport.
Leveraging the MAGNM FTTH GPON solution, Vianet is rolling out in the Sudbury area a triple-play package that will include MPEG4 IP television, ultrafast Internet and telephone services as part of a long-term strategy to bring advanced broadband communications services to the greater Ontario market.
Vianet's IP television offering will provide a superior user experience and "whole home" DVR services, with the bandwidth to deliver HD signal to three large HD televisions in a home at the same time. This will be supplemented by dedicated Internet services operating at 45 Mb/s, far faster than anything currently available on the market over the traditional copper and hybrid coaxial networks operated by other cable and Internet service providers.
Vianet turned to Enablence for the network equipment to support this advanced broadband network after an exhaustive process that evaluated competitive offerings from major global suppliers of FTTH equipment. Enablence's MAGNM platform proved to have the best combination of functionality, ease-of-use and scalability to grow with the network without costly investments in new hardware.
"We wanted a network that would give us the increased bandwidth we need now for HDTV and high-speed Internet, with an easy and affordable upgrade path as the network and the demands upon it grow," said Daniel Regaudie, Vianet's Director of Broadcast Services. "MAGNM emerged as the obvious choice due to the easy network provisioning afforded by its Broadband Access Manager and the future-proof benefits of its F-8200 series switch fabrics. These fabrics boosted the MAGNM's switching performance tenfold, which gave it a significant advantage over the other systems we considered."
The Broadband Access Manager, or BAM, is Enablence's element management software for management and performance optimization of the MAGNM. Recently, Enablence released its F-8200 switch fabrics, which deliver new features to the market that are critical to Vianet – in addition to 10 Gbps transport links, the fabrics provide 10 Gbps redundant interconnects to access modules in the system with the ability to perform "hitless upgrades" of the switch fabrics with no service interruptions. These special features allow an easy upgrade path in the future without a major investment in new equipment.
Vianet is proceeding with its rollout in three phases, with Phase 1 to be completed by the end of this year. Vianet's goal is to claim a substantial share of the Greater Sudbury market over the next three to four years, a market with about 65,000 homes and roughly 158,000 residents. However, Vianet is also setting its sights on other Ontario markets where it already offers traditional telephone and Internet services.
"At a time when newspaper headlines are talking about how Canada has lost its leadership position in the global broadband race, Vianet is proving that the next-generation services that only fiber-to-the-home can provide are accessible to Canadians, and not just to residents of big cities, but to rural and smaller urban markets," said Tim Thorsteinson, President and COO of Enablence. "We look forward to our partnership with Vianet to deliver the benefits of FTTH across Ontario."