Core Network Project of the Year: Transmode Systems and HGC |
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Transmode's regional breakthrough contract win with Hutchison Global Communications - which Telecom Asia readers ranked as the top Core Network Project of 2013 - was just one highlight of a busy and successful 2013 for the company, which recorded strong financial performance as it expanded its packet-optical networking solutions portfolio.
"We started the year with our initial 100G product for high capacity networks and at the other end of the spectrum we introduced our iAccess solution for highly automated Layer 2 Ethernet CE2.0 services for applications such as mobile backhaul and business Ethernet services," says Ola Elmeland, global VP of marketing and communications at Transmode. "We also introduced a new mobile fronthaul solution to support the migration to Cloud-RAN architectures and started to roll out our first iWDM-PON networks. All in all a very busy year!"
Transmode has also been busy developing its SDN strategy. As we went to press, Transmode was set to release the first tranche of SDN functionality with fully automated path selection via a Path Computation Element (PCE) engine, which will "automate the task of finding the optimum route through a network, and can be coupled with service templates to quickly select a preconfigured set of parameters for each new service," Elmeland says.
As for the award-winning 100G backbone project with HGC, Elmeland says that while there were several factors that helped it land the contract, "primarily it comes down to the better economics and performance of the network over the architectures proposed by our competitors. The solution offers a leaner design that simplifies the network with an all-optical ROADM based architecture which lowers the cost of the solution but also has a massive impact on space and power requirements which are important everywhere but especially so in a dense environment such as Hong Kong. By simplifying the network, the solution provides better performance in key areas such as low latency which is very important to HGC's customers in the financial services sector."
Looking ahead to 2014, Transmode expects to see the market move further along the packet-optical roadmap, and the various solutions introduced this year will evolve to new levels, Elmeland says.
"For example 100G technology will take advantage of new pluggable 100G optics to lower the cost of 100G in metro networks," he says. "Also SDN will continue to evolve to expand automation within a network and will then take advantage of new standards in SDN interfaces to enable communication between SDN enabled domains."
Meanwhile, expect to see more functionality added to transport networks as more operators migrate to a collapsed packet-optical network, Elmeland adds. "Overall these trends will enable operators to roll out higher capacity networks faster with better economics and better performance, which helps them face the future."
Why they won
This project interconnects customer premises, data centers and submarine cable landing stations in Hong Kong via an 80-wavelength optical network using low power and compact nodes, saving both energy and space.