OREANDA-NEWS. May 17, 2011. Fujitsu, a leading provider of business, information technology, and communications solutions, announced today that the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) branch of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has granted “RUS Technical Acceptance” to the Fujitsu FLASHWAVE® 9500 Packet Optical Networking Platform (Packet ONP). By adding this platform to the RUS List of Acceptable Materials (Telecommunications), the USDA has made it easier for rural communities to use federal stimulus funds to create next-generation optical networks that bring video, residential broadband, enterprise connectivity, and other advanced services to underserved markets.

With RUS approval, the FLASHWAVE 9500 system joins several other Fujitsu platforms on the RUS List of Acceptable Materials (Telecommunications). Products currently on this list include the FLASHWAVE 7500 Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer (ROADM), FLASHWAVE 4500 Multiservice Provisioning Platform (MSPP), the FLASHWAVE 4100 optical access platform, the FLASHWAVE 4010 remote SONET extension platform, the FLASHWAVE 7120 managed wavelength system, and the FLASHWAVE 7420 Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) platform.

“Our FLASHWAVE 9500 Packet ONP is widely deployed by many of the world’s largest cable/MSOs and telecom companies, but now that our platform is on the RUS List of Acceptable Materials, rural service providers can finally reap many of the same reliability and scalability benefits in their own networks,” said Doug Moore, senior vice president of sales, marketing and services at Fujitsu Network Communications. “This new class of optical transport solution simultaneously supports Connection-Oriented Ethernet (COE), ROADM and SONET/SDH. The FLASHWAVE 9500 platform scales to multi-terabytes of traffic per node to support ever-increasing voice, video and data traffic demands, bringing exciting new broadband services to rural communities while keeping costs under control for the carriers who serve them.”
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 includes an allocation of more than USD 7B for broadband initiatives. All Fujitsu platforms on the RUS List of Acceptable Materials are eligible for purchase using these federal stimulus funds. The RUS provides independent and rural utilities and telecommunications service providers with low-interest financing to assist in the purchase of new equipment. RUS financing keeps deployment costs down and helps rural providers to compete with services offered by larger regional and national carriers, as well as to pass cost savings on to consumers.