Narad Networks has a new switching platform and a new CEO.
Michael Collette, the former CEO of Ucentric Systems, a home media-networking firm that Motorola Inc. bought in January, is the new CEO at enterprise-services provider Narad. He replaces John Petrillo, who remains chairman of the privately owned firm.
Narad also debuted a next-generation switch that can provision up to 10 ports for fiber transmission to the curb and said it had secured additional funding.
“With the new product, it adds the ability to run fiber forward,” Collette said in an interview.
“Say you have two good business trunks on a node and you have 100 Megabits [per second] to sell to 20 to 30 subscribers,” he said. “You may run out of bandwidth.
“You can do a Narad node split, put a new switch in and cut the nodes in half. With four new outputs, you can have 500 Megabits versus 100 Megabits.”
Collette said the relative cost to place fiber deeper in the transport network — meaning all the way to the premises with the new switch — compares favorably with dense wave-division multiplexing (DWDM).
“We’re hugely less expensive,” he said. “It’s simpler to switch than to do DWDM, and one gig of capacity only requires two wavelengths on a node.
“The unique thing is we can switch fiber and coax in the same device,” he continued. “With 30 subscribers on DWDM in a business district, we burned one fiber to do that. We can serve that entire customer base with one lambda.”
