The Edge briefs

News from Cox Communications and BigBand Networks.

Cox Communications last week awarded Nortel a three-year, $65 million contract to provide optical transport and telephony switch gear.

Cox plans to deploy Nortel’s OPTera Metro 3100, 3400 and 3500 optical platforms to increase network capacity and expand its subscriber base. Cox also expects to deploy Nortel’s DMS switches to accommodate more residential and commercial telephone subscribers. Last month, Nortel announced that Cox would deploy Nortel’s optical Ethernet equipment – including Resilient Packet Ring technology – in San Diego to offer metropolitan services such as virtual LANs.

BigBand Networks, a provider of broadband multimedia routing systems for broadcast television, and Fujitsu last week announced that they have entered a nonexclusive agreement to integrate and jointly market their products.

The two companies say they will package BigBand’s Broadband Multimedia-Service Router with Fujitsu’s Flashwave 4500 optical transport platform as a unified broadband video transport system.

This integration would let cable operators transport video programming between facilities over optical fiber via standard protocols such as Gigabit Ethernet and SONET, the companies say.