Oakland, CA — August 25, 2011 — Zhone Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZHNE), a global pioneer in FTTx network access solutions, today announced the addition of Venus Telephone (Venus) to its customer roster. The 100-year-old local telephone provider in Venus, Pa., currently offers triple-play services to more than 1,400 customers and will deploy Zhone’s industry leading MXK™ as its primary Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) access platform for the new fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network it is building.
Beginning in September 2011, Zhone’s MXK solution will effectively enable Venus to deliver affordable and reliable high speed Internet access, VoIP and IP video services to the local businesses and consumers in a 54 square mile radius.
“Our customers – residential and commercial – are now demanding more and more bandwidth,” noted John Keister, vice president of Venus. “We needed a solution to address our bandwidth requirements, along with any new demands that may arise in the future, in a cost-effective manner. We chose Zhone’s access solution due to its impressive density, switching capacity and the small footprint offered by 8-port GPON cards. The MXK also gives us superior scale, effective network management capabilities and overall system flexibility to support multiples services in the same chassis.”
Zhone has leveraged deep experience in managing the complexity of multi-service access to build the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio of FTTx solutions. With Venus providing Triple Play services including IP Video and the MXK’s proven ability to provide these services cost-effectively via either Passive Optical Network (PON) or point-to-point Active Ethernet networks, the MXK became an ideal fit for this project. To ensure maximum customer impact, another reason Venus selected Zhone’s MXK, the multiservice access network (MSAN), was to support T1s and symmetrical high bitrate digital subscriber line Ethernet in the first mile (SHDSL-EFM) for business solutions.
“Our MXK is amongst the leading multi-service solution for copper, fiber and Ethernet based services,” explained Brian Caskey, chief marketing officer for Zhone. “Our customers come to us due to our inherent expertise in deploying carrier-class solutions pertaining to both consumers and business services and our ability to work with our customers for their customized needs. The combination of the industry-leading MXK and zNID ONTs, along with the fully integrated ZMS management capabilities provide service providers a high performance and highly scalable access solution. Our solution is providing Venus with the opportunity to offer ten times the bandwidth of its previous network in a smaller footprint.”
Zhone has deployed more than 2,000 of its fully redundant, carrier-grade all-IP MXK platforms with more than 150 service providers globally in 40 plus countries. Featuring industry-leading density, scalability and switching capacity, the MXK is the industry’s first terabit access concentrator and provides non-blocking capacity of up to 3,600 100 Mbps GPON subscribers or 360 1G Active Ethernet subscribers.
For more information about Zhone’s MXK solution or to learn more about the other solutions offered in the new Zhone FiberHome™ portfolio, please visit http://www.zhone.com/products/MXK/ or http://www.zhone.com/solutions/fttn/.