OFC/NFOEC: Mahi adds German CWDM gear, 10-GigE cards

ANAHIEM, Calif.--Metro networking equipment vendor Mahi Networks announced a new partnership with a European vendor for coarse wavelength-division multiplexing equipment as well new optical Ethernet cards for its own reconfigurable dense WDM transport platform.

Mahi will rebrand and resell the products of LastMile, a German optical access equipment vendor, for the North American market, giving carriers a less expensive access option when deploying Mahi's high-end, 64-wavelength Vx7 reconfigurable DWDM platform, which it obtained through its acquisition of Photuris. LastMile's CWDM product will become Mahi's Lx5 Fiber Pilot, and the German vendor's 8-channel, one-rack termination unit will become Mahi's Lx3 Light Pilot.

Mahi has already begun selling LastMile's products in North America and expects to begin shipping them in the next two to six weeks. As part of the agreement, LastMile's parent company, a distributor called Controlware, will sell and distribute Mahi's products in Europe.

The deal isn't Mahi's first partnership in the access space. It also has an OEM relationship with White Rock Networks, rebranding White Rock's metro-access micro-multiservice provisioning platform as its own Dx7.

In addition, Mahi announced two new optical Ethernet cards for the Vx7. One is a ten-port Gig-E (or 10 Gig-E) transponder that uses generic framing procedure (GFP) and virtual concatenation (VCAT) to support Gig-E, fiber channel, ESCON and FICON. Behind the multiplexer is a Sonet ADM chip set, allowing carriers to add or drop Gig-E signals at any point on a ring the way they would do with STSs on a Sonet network. The product, said Alan DiCicco, Mahi's director of product marketing, will be useful in efficiently aggregating broadband traffic in a hub--especially backhauling rich fiber-to-the-premises and video traffic to video servers and Ethernet switches--because it allows carriers to add or drop that traffic using only one wavelength.

The new cards should begin shipping next month, DiCicco said.

Another card includes XFP client interfaces supporting 10-Gig-E LAN, 10-Gig-E WAN, OC-192, STM-64, and G.709 services to support traffic growth resulting from rising levels of consumer bandwidth.