Adtran, Alcatel go down-market

This week's TelecomNext show will feature plenty of talk about the ongoing tri-company request for proposals for Gigabit passive optical network access networks with an emphasis on eventually getting up to 100 Mb/s to the customer premises. Adtran and Alcatel, though separately, will take a slightly different tact by launching products focused on the lower end of the market.

Alcatel's newest service router, the 7710, is a compact unit with a throughput of 12 Gb/s specifically aimed at mobile operators, carriers with smaller points of presence (POPs) and emerging markets.

“Fundamentally, this is about expanding our addressable market,” said Lindsay Newell, vice president of marketing for the IP division of Alcatel. “The new product is an expansion of the 7750 portfolio and has the same common feature set, but it allows us to reach a broader market. It gives us more granularity and modularity for the lowest-speed applications.”

Alcatel also is unveiling Telecom New Zealand as the first public customer of the 7710. The company, which carries the majority of international voice traffic for New Zealand also has several POPS around the U.S. that will use the 7710.

“The flexibility of the platform [which includes the same operating environment as the 7750] allows them to do that migration very cost-effectively,” Newell said.

Adtran, meanwhile, will launch an extension of its Total Access series that sets the stage for its migration to VDSL2. The TA5000 will be similar to the TA3000 DSLAM but with an Ethernet core. On the access side of the box, the vendor will have combination cards for carriers to put POTS and ADSL2+ in the same slot. Adtran also will migrate to VDSL2 when the technology is a little more stable, said Mike Martin, director of product management for the TA5000.

The company also is marketing the new platform as an aggregation play for lower-end services. “The ability to aggregate those DS-1s and bring them up to an Ethernet core is going to be important,” Martin said.

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