Fulfilling the goal of their partnership, Lightchip announced that it's intelligent optical transport subsystems are enabling ANTEC to create broadband networks that support next-generation revenue-producing services while ensuring high quality of service and greatly enhanced customer satisfaction.

As competition heats up in the consumer communications market, cable operators are racing to offer new services such as cable telephony, high-speed Internet and video on demand. The Lightchip-ANTEC partnership provides cable companies with a metro optical networking platform that enables flexible, highly reliable, fiber-rich, two-way broadband connections.

Together, Lightchip and ANTEC are bringing dense wavelength division multiplexing's bandwidth-boosting capabilities and wavelength management to MSO networks. This will benefit metropolitan areas where multiple traffic types and unpredictable end-user demand create an environment much more complex than standard long-haul networks. ANTEC's cable customers are realizing considerable savings per household resulting from the introduction of intelligent optical transport into their networks.

"Managing every wavelength is the key to viable, service-ready metro optical services, particularly for cable companies contending with more competition and customers who have many more service options," said Isadore Katz, president and CEO of Lightchip. "Working with ANTEC, our intelligent optical transport solution is giving leading cable providers a competitive advantage as they strive to provide exciting new communications services."

"Given the increasing complexity of broadband networks, our customers require monitoring and management capabilities that enable them to view network degradation before it becomes service affecting. Together, ANTEC and Lightchip are giving the cable industry visibility into network performance at the wavelength level. This unprecedented full view gives service providers invaluable intelligence into the inner workings of broadband networks that will result in more effective, cost-efficient service provisioning and delivery," said Bryant Isaacs, president of ANTEC Network Technologies.

Lightchip's intelligent optical transport subsystems are fully bi-directional on a single fiber. Therefore, cable companies can run return paths on a single system, conserving valuable fiber resources and providing reliable return path solutions that will enable providers to deliver personalized, interactive services such as video-on-demand. Deployment costs are significantly reduced because Lightchip products perform with ultra-low insertion loss, maximizing fiber efficiency and dramatically reducing the need for costly optical amplifiers.

Antec's LIGHTPLEX product platform is built upon Lightchip's passive optical wavelength router (OWR) and optical wavelength manager (OWM). The OWR muxes/demuxes up to 40 bi-directional optical channels. The solution allows cable system operators to proactively monitor and manage all channels in a DWDM system, a comprehensive perspective that includes the status of wavelengths, optical power and optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR). Web-based SNMP and remote access give cable companies a full view into their optical networks, allowing proactive, pin-point management and monitoring capabilities that enable providers to solve problems before they affect customers' service.