Cox, Fujitsu Move ‘FASST’ in Big Easy

Cox Communications Inc. has adopted Fujitsu Network Communications Inc.’s “Fujitsu Flexible Architecture for Subscriber Service Termination (FASST)” strategy, the companies said Monday.

The MSO has completed deployment of Atrica Inc.'s carrier-class optical-Ethernet products, a key component of the FASST portfolio, for a converged voice-, video- and data-services network serving 140 New Orleans Public Schools.

Each school site now receives high-speed, guaranteed services including Internet access, voice over Internet protocol, IP/H.323 videoconferencing and distance learning.

“The Fujitsu FASST strategy with Atrica's optical-Ethernet systems was the best solution we evaluated that met each of the rigorous business and technical demands this project presented," Cox New Orleans network-transport-engineering manager Paul Schowalter said in a prepared statement.

"While transporting potentially large flows of traffic across the network, transparency to the school network and honoring QoS [quality-of-service] markings from end-to-end were vitally important,” he added. “Atrica's layer-2 transparency with MPLS [multiprotocol label switching] bandwidth control and QoS mechanisms allowed us to build a high-performance network that supports all of the multimedia applications the school system will run across it."