Cisco this week unveiled upgrades to its ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform designed to enable service providers and enterprises to improve service delivery, network scalability and management.

The ONS 15454 MSTP is Cisco’s flagship metro optical transport system. There are more than 75,000 deployed, Cisco says.

This is in contrast to Cisco’s other optical platforms, such as the ONS 15800 long-haul Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) platforms and ONS 15900 wavelength router, which have reached end-of-life status. Indeed, speculation has been rampant in recent years that Cisco would exit the optical business.

But optical grew 40% year-over-year in the second quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2007, so the company is riding the fortunes of the ONS 15454 and the metro optical market for now.

The enhancements to the 15454 include 40-channel Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexing (ROADM), Ethernet Crossponder (Xponder) and a Multiservice Provisioning Platform (MSPP)-on-a-blade.

The ROADM functionality supports a service provider’s migration from ring-based topologies to more fiber efficient mesh DWDM topologies while also simplifying provisioning and troubleshooting, Cisco says.

The Ethernet Xponder provides aggregation of 1Mbps up to 1Gbps Ethernet into G.709-compliant 10Gbps wavelengths for delivery to Cisco routers. This is intended to enable service providers who have deployed the ONS 15454 platform for other services to add a blade to provide Ethernet aggregation services in remote central offices, Cisco says.

The MSPP-on-a-blade enables MSPP SONET/SDH functionality to reside on a single card inside a Cisco MSTP DWDM chassis. It is designed to assist service providers to migrate from SONET/SDH services to DWDM services in the same ONS 15454 chassis, thereby protecting their ONS 15454 investments, Cisco says.

All upgrades are available now.