telecoms-mag.com
"Visitors to Quantum Bridge Communications may spot these maxims scattered
about the North Andover, Mass., company's facilities: "Speed is Life, "Check
Your Six" and "Never Lose Sight"-lessons drilled into fighter pilots. They've
entered the culture of Quantum Bridge courtesy of Jeff Gwynne, the company's
co-founder and vice president of marketing, whose family includes an F-111
pilot. Translated to the telecom world, they could mean that if optical
technology is good enough for the core and metro networks, it ought to be
good enough for the last mile. Quantum Bridge's backers agree: A third round
of funding recently brought in $102 million, bringing total funding to $124
million.
Quantum Bridge uses a passive optical network (PON)-a technology with no
active components in the outside plant-to extend the light out to the customer
premises. The company uses a technique called Dynamic Wavelength Slicing
that enables a single wavelength to deliver services to multiple end points. The
end result is huge bandwidth delivered cheaply to businesses that are directly
connected by fiber. The Quantum Bridge solution, which consists of the
QB100 Intelligent Optical Terminal located at a customer's premises and the
QB5000 Optical Access Switch that resides at the central office (CO), point of
presence (POP) or headend, gives customers the bandwidth they need-from 1
Mbps to 100 Mbps or an entire wavelength. The QB100 is equipped with four
DS1 interfaces and a 10/100-Mbps Ethernet connection for the customer; the
QB5000 supports OC-12c/48c ATM or packet-over-SONET interfaces for
connection to the WAN, as well as SONET interfaces for PSTN connectivity.
Although positioned as a last-mile, bandwidth-relief technology, the Quantum
Bridge solution could just as easily be used to backhaul traffic from other
access solutions such as digital subscriber line (DSL) and broadband wireless.
"Quantum Bridge's Optical Access System offers service providers with a
flexible, cost-effective solution for extending broadband services to thousands
of bandwidth-starved business establishments," said Rosemary Cochran,
principal at Vertical Systems Group. "The company's innovative use of passive
optical network technology cracks the local access barrier for emerging
applications that demand connectivity above T1 rates." |
