Calix Announces New E5-312 Platform and Enhanced Extended Reach GPON on the Calix C7; Rounds Out Industry’s Most Versatile Portfolio of Fiber Access Solutions

Business Wire, June 24, 2009

Calix Extends Its FTTP Leadership With GPON and Active Ethernet Fiber Deployments With More Than 375 Customers

PETALUMA, Calif. -- Calix, the largest communications equipment supplier focused solely on access solutions for broadband service delivery, today announced the availability of the Calix E5-312, a residential Active Ethernet (AE) platform. With over 375 fiber to the premises (FTTP) customers to date, Calix is continuing to expand its industry-leading fiber portfolio with the small form-factor E5-312. Calix also announced today the availability of an enhancement to its industry-leading Extended Reach GPON on the Calix C7 Multiservice Access Platform (MSAP), now allowing customers to reach subscribers located up to 40 km from any Calix C7 FTTP serving location.

“The addition of new optimized residential Active Ethernet and enhanced rural GPON solutions to the Calix Unified Access Infrastructure provide service providers deploying fiber with expanded options and unmatched FTTP deployment flexibility,” said Kevin Pope, senior vice president of product development at Calix. “No matter what the deployment scenario is for our service provider customers deploying fiber — whether it is GPON or Active Ethernet, business or residential services, small form factor or high-density requirements, or a need to support RF video or IPTV — Calix has the right solution to meet our customers’ needs.”

The Calix E5-312 delivers last mile AE service to residential subscribers at distances of up to 60 km while preserving service providers’ current investment in Calix’ optical network terminals (ONTs). The new residential AE platform offers a number of benefits:

• The E5-312 is a purpose-built, environmentally hardened, small-form-factor 1RU platform that enables flexible deployment from the CO to the edge of the access network.
• AE enables up to 1Gbps dedicated symmetrical bandwidth, allowing service providers to strategically serve high capacity residential customers whose upstream bandwidth requirements exceed that of the general consumer.
• The flexibility of the Calix 700GX ONTs, which auto-detects and supports both AE and GPON from a common ONT, enables service providers to use the E5-312, or other Calix C- and E-Series platforms, to select the appropriate form factor and technology to match the service requirements of subscribers without the capital or operational expense of replacing the ONT.

The entire Calix FTTP product portfolio supports Calix’ 700GX ONT family, which leverages Calix’ ONT auto-detect optics to support GPON and Active Ethernet. Auto-detect optics streamline a service provider’s ability to offer any service, any technology and any speed, including RF overlay and IPTV, from a common FTTP serving location. The 700GX ONTs allow service providers to remotely provision and convert any subscriber to residential AE without expensive truck-rolls or customer premises ONT upgrades.

“The Calix E5-312 and 40km Extended Reach GPON provide the perfect complements to our existing GPON deployments,” said Rob St. Clair, plant manager for Paul Bunyan Telephone. “Both solutions give us new deployment flexibility and options, yet provide us with the operational advantage of allowing delivery via the same ONT we already deploy, and management via the same Calix Management System (CMS). With the Calix FTTP portfolio, we have the flexibility to deploy the most appropriate fiber technology to deliver virtually any advanced residential or business broadband service—optimized to each unique customer or deployment scenario.”

Scalable Solution Supports Active Ethernet Services

The E5-312 offers a number of important features to meet service provider deployment needs:

• The platform has 12 GE SFP ports for symmetric 1GE AE services that support copper or bi-directional (single fiber) optical modules; the AE optics modules are Calix screened to ensure carrier-grade performance.
• Two standards-based 10GE SFP ports support ring and point-to-point topologies.
• The platform supports several access network topologies, including GE/AE aggregation, GE uplink aggregation, 10GE/GE network uplink, and link aggregation.
• Link aggregation provides logical NxGE link bonding for bandwidth expansion.
• The E5-312 is fully managed by the Calix Management System (CMS), which provides a single network view and a common user experience independent of media type, protocol, or service.

Enhanced Extended Reach GPON Solution Optimized for Rural Environments