Aurora Networks outdistanced a field of prominent competitors to win a contract to upgrade Vidéotron’s network in Montreal. The contract is worth a minimum of $80 million to Aurora, according to the company.
Other vendors reported to be angling for all or part of the business included Cisco, Motorola, Arris and Harmonic.
Vidéotron will deploy Aurora’s Fiber Deep architecture throughout the Greater Montréal Area, passing 1.8 million homes. As of March 31, 2008, Vidéotron was serving nearly 1.7 million cable TV customers in Québec, including 802,800 illico digital TV subscribers.
“We were looking for an optical transport partner who could deliver a high-value, cost-effective, next-generation network architecture in a timely manner,” said Daniel Proulx, SVP of engineering for Vidéotron.
Aurora’s Fiber Deep approach eliminates RF actives from the network, which can halve operators’ power costs and quarter their operational costs while gaining a ten-fold increase in narrowcast bandwidth per home.
Aurora’s optical transport product line includes patented digital return, an Essential Features Node and the Light-Plex product family.
Separately, Aurora has expanded its family of Light-PlexT integrated optical narrowcast demuxplexers and broadcast/narrowcast combiners. The company’s new OP4528 features built-in optical power level management capabilities, which simplify the installation, set up and maintenance of Fiber Deep, DWDM architectures.
Aurora designed the OP4528 for installation in its VHubT, which serves up to 20,000 homes in a standard node housing. As cable operators add new video or data carriers, they can use the OP4528 to realign power levels remotely via an SNMP interface to an element management system. Previously, operators needed to coordinate a headend tech and field tech to simultaneously set up the link. The OP4528 also enables cable operators to add optical wavelengths without interrupting existing narrowcast services to their subscribers.
The OP4528 features four optical input ports for broadcast and narrowcast services. Nine output ports are available (one port for narrowcast services passthrough and eight combined broadcast/narrowcast ports). Each combined port delivers unique content to its related service area. Each OP4528 demultiplexes up to eight DWDM wavelengths and is available in five ITU wavelength groups. Up to three OP4528s can be installed in a single VHub to generate up to 24 unique service areas.
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