Larscom and Vina Technologies will be merged by the end of the week, Larscom Wednesday announced at SuperComm 2003, meaning the two companies can expand their work on access devices that deliver broadband services to businesses over fiber.

The stock deal that gives Vina shareholders a quarter share of stock for each share they own of Vina, was approved this week by Larscom’s board and should be complete Friday, the company says. The new company will retain the Larscom name.

Both companies already make access devices, with Larscom trending toward high bandwidth and Vina toward low. By year-end, the companies will be melding their expertise into integrated voice/data access devices that sit at customer sites, Larscom says. Neither company is profitable, but Larscom projects the merged company will be by this time next year.

At the show, Larscom is demonstrating its new carrier box that acts as a go between connecting SONET networks to customers via Ethernet and traditional TDM circuits. The demonstration shows the box working with an optical add-drop multiplexer made by Corrigent.

Traditional SONET networks use SONET add-drop multiplexers (ADM) to put traffic on and take traffic off SONET rings, but cost upwards of $25,000, making it expensive to deploy to customer sites. Orion 7400 connects directly to ADMs and costs $5,000. It features interfaces small enough to deliver services directly to customers. Orion 7400 is designed to sit in the basement of multitenant buildings or large customer sites. It could also be placed in carrier switching offices if the density of customer sites didn’t warrant pushing them into subscribers’ buildings.

Larscom also announced that microwave transmission vendor Stratex will resell Orion 7400 as a way to connect its gear to customers. Larscom says it will announce other similar relationships with broadband network vendors throughout the year.

Orion 7400 is a SONET multiservice platform that enables carriers to make efficient use of existing SONET rings by distributing Ethernet packets among rigid SONET timeslots without leaving large gaps unused.
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Orion 7400 connects to the provider network via OC-3 links and to customers via 10M, 100M or Gigabit Etherrnet, T-1 or T-3 ports. Later this year the company will add OC-12 uplinks and STS-12 interfaces for Europe.