June 29, 2009

LG-Nortel Picks up PON win in Norway

Agder Broadband has deployed an LG-Nortel Ethernet Fiber Access solution, in conjunction with channel partner INS, to provide high-speed broadband services to homes in the southern region of Norway. LG-Nortel is a joint venture of LG Electronics and Nortel.

The solution will enable Agder Broadband to extend its service reach from cities and dense populated areas to smaller outlying communities in areas such as Indre Agder. The fiber based infrastructure can deliver ultra broadband speeds of up to one hundred megabits per second (100 Mbps) and will position Agder to introduce triple play services in these smaller communities. Agder's new broadband service offerings are expected to become commercially available in July 2009.

The solution addresses Agder's challenge of clearing first mile bottlenecks to enable the provision of high speed services to homes across Norway. Agder Broadband already had fiber infrastructure installed which reached distant villages across Norway. However, extending high-speed broadband services to households in these villages was not economically feasible because it meant installing new long distance fiber or building expensive and power-consuming central offices to provide dedicated fiber for each connected household.

"While we wanted to deliver high-speed broadband to a greater sector of the Norwegian population, we still needed to make a commercial return," said Toralf Nyheim, managing director, Agder Broadband AS. "Even with an existing fiber network in place we faced the classic expensive 'first-mile' problem until INS proposed an ethernet fiber access solution based on next generation WDM-PON technology."

Developed by LG-Nortel, the Ethernet Fiber Access solution helps service providers prevent bandwidth bottlenecks in the critical "first-mile" of their networks. This enables faster and more reliable delivery of data between high-speed core networks and individual user access points.

"Compared to the alternatives, WDM-PON technology represents real value for customers like Agder Broadband," said Peter MacKinnon, chairman , LG-Nortel. "WDM-PON is clearly emerging as the technology of choice for service operators' access networks, driven by an ever increasing demand for bandwidth and cost effective next generation, high availability, access infrastructure."

The LG-Nortel Ethernet Fiber Access solution offers a simple engineering and deployment model that accelerates the deployment of fiber-to-the-home and fiber-to-the-building. The solution combines the best attributes of an Ethernet Point-to-Point system (bi-directional high bandwidth performance for business and residential customers), with the fiber efficiency and OPEX simplicity of a passive optical system. Additionally, it delivers a secure service, greater reach, simpler scalability and engineering while providing a future-proof foundational infrastructure for services.

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