OSSINING, N.Y. -- RSoft Design Group, Inc. (www.rsoftdesign.com), the market leader in optical design, simulation, and optimization software, today announced significant enhancements to MetroWANDT, a PC-based network-planning tool developed for metropolitan and mesh networks. MetroWAND's capabilities enable network planners, equipment vendors, and service providers to efficiently determine the impact of new technology on network economics. MetroWAND has added capability to perform availability analysis and calculate end-to-end service downtime. Given a network component's failure characteristics - mean time to failure (MTTF) and mean time to repair (MTTR) - its availability is estimated. The tool can be used to input failure characteristics of various network components including tributary cards, plug-ins, cross-connects, cable, and more. If a user specifies routing based on maximum availability, the availability values are first used to perform Maximum Availability Routing. MetroWAND computes and orders paths based on highest availability (most reliable path) while maintaining all other service constraints. The availability analysis feature in MetroWAND can be used by network service providers to model and analyze the reliability of different network architectures like ring, mesh, point-to-point, and architectures with or without digital cross connects. In addition, equipment with similar functionality (such as add/drop multiplexers) can be modeled for different reliability configurations. These reliability values can be used to cost-effectively configure the equipment in the network to meet all service level agreements (SLAs). In today's down market, this approach is critical in helping service providers reduce network operating costs. The enhancements announced today are currently available in MetroWAND 3.1. RSoft Design Group Inc.