Ekinops has delivered its first Ekinops360 ETSc, a new compact optical transport networking (OTN) platform that enables a new Transport-as-a-Service (TaaS) model for service providers.
According to recent figures from Adroit Market Research, the optical wavelength services market is expected to nearly double by 2028 with small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) expected to provide a majority of that growth with sub-10G services making up over half of a $7bn market. OTN can help make this happen because it allows service providers to partition the capacity of a single optical carrier and sell it in sub-rate increments rather than requiring a customer to purchase an entire wavelength. It also allows the service provider to increase revenue by offering a premium, customised service level agreement (SLA) using secure, dedicated bandwidth and performance monitoring for each individual sub-rate service.
The Ekinops ETSc leverages this field proven technology using the latest advances in network processor chipsets to enable a new ‘Transport-as-a-Service’ (TaaS) model for service providers with the performance requirements that today’s high capacity, high value services demand. OTN makes TaaS possible by allowing it to match the amount of bandwidth used to the client data rate for any size service from gigabit Ethernet (1.25Gb/s) to 400GbE with dedicated resources end-to-end and rapid provisioning capability.
It provides full OTN switch capability with scalability from 100Gb/s to 6Tb/s to address the requirements of any network node from access to the core. As small as 1RU and with low power consumption, it can even be used as customer premises equipment (CPE) for layer 1 services. Highly agile and flexible, the ETSc can be used for both new and existing infrastructure deployments as well as for service delivery.
Initial interest came from a new North American Tier 1 customer and the ETSc is currently undergoing full field validation and integration into an open, multi-vendor SDN-controlled environment. The new OTN platform can also be managed by Celestis NMS, Ekinops’ converged network management system that provides a single tool for end-to-end management of both Ekinops360 OTN and WDM networks.
