NEC Eluminant Technologies, Inc. (eLUMINANT) announced today the production kick-off of passive optical network (PON) components at the NEC America Hillsboro, Oregon facility.

The 383,000 sq. ft. facility will be one of the largest PON manufacturing plants in the world with the capability of producing 40,000 multiplexers and optical access terminals (OATs) per year.

Jim Holley, vice president of marketing for eLUMINANT, said, "We want our carrier customers to know that we are dedicated to the advancement of PON technology. Our state-of-the-art manufacturing facility will turn out PON-based products that are fully compliant with the recently adopted ITU-T G.983 specification based on the FSAN (Full Service Access Network) initiative. We have rolled out our first prototype units without a hitch after working with major carriers for the past two years to refine the characteristics of the product."

Carriers plan to use PON technology to deliver new broadband voice, video and data services. According to an article in Fibertoday.com, "One selling point of the system is that it can handle all existing traffic loads and leave space for the bandwidth that carriers and vendors believe will be coming as Internet services fatten up and video becomes more of a real networking force."

In January 2000, the Oregon plant was recognized by the QuEST Forum as one of the first telecommunications vendors to be granted TL9000 registration. TL9000 is the new quality standard carriers are beginning to require of their telecom vendors.

The facility, which employs over 500 people, including design, test and production engineers, also manufactures VISTA, eLUMINANT's SONET access multiplexer product as well as other NEC transmission, car electronics and PBX products.

PON technology conserves fibers and eliminates the need for active loop electronics, powering and monitoring equipment. eLUMINANT's prototype product, FiberSLAM(TM), is the first PON product to be manufactured at the Oregon facility.

The FiberSLAM units are being tested in carrier labs now and eLUMINANT expects to announce commercial availability at the SUPERCOMM 2000 trade show in Atlanta in June.

FiberSLAM is a passive optical network system that has a Fiber Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer (FSLAM(TM)) unit which drives a single fiber connection. The unit can host up to 17 PON interfaces and a total of 19 slots are available to accommodate combinations of PON cards, triple DS3 cards, and OC-N cards.

The FSLAM optically splits the fiber to connect up to 32 optical access terminals located on the customer premises. These terminals deliver both packet- and circuit-based services. The optical splitting is achieved by an inexpensive passive optical splitter located in the central office or in the local loop facility.

NEC Eluminant Technologies, Inc., with 150 employees, is headquartered in Herndon, Virginia with its research and development center based in Portland, Oregon. The company's mission is to "light up the loop" by removing broadband access bottlenecks using fiber optic technology.

http://www.eluminant.com