EXFO garners telecom product innovation award

-- Test & Measurement World, 7/10/2006 1:31:00 PM

EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering is the recipient of Frost & Sullivan’s 2006 Product Differentiation Innovation Award in recognition of its new portfolio of protocol test systems for next-generation and conventional SONET/SDH networks.

The award is presented annually to the telecommunications test and measurement company who “best demonstrates the ability to develop products with successful adoption of new or existing technologies that have become a part of its well-designed product family. Such innovation is expected to significantly contribute to the industry in terms of product performance and degree/rate of technical change.”

EXFO launched the FTB-8120NG and FTB-8130NG Transport Blazer modules for its flagship FTB-400 universal test system. Both modules—the former for 2.5-Gbps and the latter for 10-Gbps systems—support an extensive list of next-generation and legacy SONET/SDH features, including generic framing procedure, high and low-order virtual concatenation, link-capacity adjustment scheme, and direct mapping of Ethernet frames for Packet-over-SONET.

The company also introduced the FTB-8120 and FTB-8130 Transport Blazer modules for the FTB-200 Compact Platform, a smaller two-slot portable unit that is used by field technicians to perform a wide range of tests from simple bit-error-rate analysis to more advanced network characterization and troubleshooting. Finally, EXFO released the IQS-8120NG and IQS-8130NG Transport Blazer modules for the IQS-500 Intelligent Test System, which is designed for the manufacturing floor and lab environments.

All test modules come equipped with EXFO’s SmartMode feature, which provides automatic discovery of the SONET/SDH mixed-mapping signal structure, including VCAT member identification.