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July 17, 2012
8:45 AM EDT

by  Bo Gowan

Ciena 3931 wins Cable Spotlight Product of the Year Award

Ciena’s unique environmentally hardened 3931 Carrier Ethernet Solution has been named a Cable Spotlight Product of the Year Award Winner.  The annual award, selected by Cable Spotlight’s editorial team, highlights the most innovative cable technology products brought to market in the last year.

The “unique” aspect of Ciena’s 3931 Service Delivery Switch comes in the form of its ability to be deployed across a range of harsh environments.  Built with an eye towards deployments for mobile backhaul and unique Ethernet services needs, the 3931 provides advanced Carrier Ethernet functionality in a fully self-contained and weatherproof form factor that can be pole mounted, H-frame mounted or placed on the exterior of a building.

In fact, the 3931 can withstand temperature extremes as hot as +65°C (+149°F) and as cold as -40°C (-40°F).  This weather hardened capability eliminates the associated costs of cabinets, enclosures, and site preparation, resulting in an exceptionally low total cost of ownership (TCO) for service providers.

The 3931’s combination of unique deployment capabilities and functionality fits nicely with the needs of Cable MSOs  -- Cable Spotlight’s target readership -- who are moving quickly to deploy Carrier Ethernet in a variety of scenarios.  One of these scenarios is the growing market for wholesale mobile backhaul services, where the 3931 can be deployed at a cell site and connected to the cable operator’s fiber network to help alleviate the bandwidth bottlenecks that mobile network operators are facing as they upgrade their networks to data-hungry 3G and 4G services (see Ciena 2012 Predictions: Cable MSOs get in the backhaul game). 

In fact, between now and 2015 Ciena expects cable operators to double (to 45,000) the number of cell towers that are connected via fiber to their networks, and mobile backhaul could grow into a $1 billion annual business for the cable operators within that timeframe.

This isn’t the first award for the Ciena 3931.  Late last year at Cable-Tec Expo 2011, the 3931 was recognized with a 4-Diamond Award (see Ciena 3931 selected for BTR Diamond Technology Award).

The success of the 3931 can be seen in more than just industry awards.  The box is already being deployed by large Cable MSOs and service providers in North America. To see more on the 3931, the below video is a discussion straight from Ciena’s R&D labs in Ottawa where product expert Mike Drew walks through the features and functionality of the Carrier Ethernet product.

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