The Switch Selects Miranda for Fiber Expansion

As part of a major 50-city expansion of its fiber transmission and local switching services, The Switch has inked a contract with Miranda Technologies to supply 3G video routing switchers and centralized control solutions.

Currently, The Switch provides local switching in six cities--New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Washington D.C., London and Toronto--and it plans to roll-out switching in 44 additional cities. Its services, which include local switching, long haul transmission, and AT&T and Verizon circuits, are used by major television broadcasters, cable operators and other companies.

The new fiber infrastructure will use 20 NVISION 8500 Hybrid routers for connecting dedicated fiber-optic circuits at the new switching facilities.

Beck Associates is handling the system design and integration for the system, which will be able to handle a wide variety of formats used by TV networks, including 3Gbps/HD/SD, JPEG 2000 compressed 3Gbps/HD/SD, SDTI and ASI.

"We're committed to build everything in our expansion to accommodate 3Gbs signals," noted David Anderson, CTO at The Switch, in a statement.

All the routers will be connected by a secure VPN, and controlled by Miranda's iControl Network Monitoring System at The Switch's Network Operations Center in New York.

The routing system is being integrated with the network's ScheduALL network management system, which allows them to schedule, reserve, and then execute video switches in all cities, across the network of Miranda routers, to the customers' local fiber optic circuits.

In addition to the new routers at the new facilities, the existing signal management infrastructures in New York, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles will be upgraded using NVISION 8500 Hybrid and NVISION 5128 systems.