Andover, MA., Cambridge, UK, – September 22, 2008 – Polatis Inc., a supplier of high performance optical switch technologies, has announced the expansion of its revolutionary zero power Latching Switch portfolio.  The three new products each boast industry leading low levels of signal loss and power consumption, and are ideal in network applications.  The Polatis Latching Switch will be on demonstrated at the Polatis booth (#274, Hall 7) at ECOC 2008, taking place this week in Brussels.

The Latching Switches require zero power to maintain an optical signal connection and less than 7W of electrical power to reconfigure a path.  Even with no electrical power consumption, the lathing switches offer Polatis’ trademark ultra high optical performance and low optical insertion loss.

“The combination of no power consumption and industry leading low loss makes the Polatis Latching Switch portfolio an utterly compelling offering to the optical communications industry,” said Jim Miller, Vice President of Worldwide Sales & Business Development.  “This product has no competitors anywhere in any market, and all the technology is wholly owned by Polatis.  We are engaging the world’s biggest carriers with this.

“This product is set to dramatically reduce costs and improve network performance, enabling new investments in entirely new network architectures.”

The Latching Switch portfolio is designed using unique, proprietary technology developed in direct response to customer demand for mission critical optical switching applications. The principal applications for the products are signal collection, network monitoring, intrusion detection, remote fiber test, and physical layer protection.  All these applications require high performance, high reliability optical switching. 

The LH series provides hitless, strictly non-blocking matrix switching; the LS series provides re-arrangably non-blocking matrix switching; and the LX series provides ultra-low loss, fixed express connections with the ability to interrupt those connections to insert test equipment or to redirect specified paths to alternate fibers.

The Polatis series of latching switches utilize time proven, highly reliable technologies to provide outstanding mean time between failure and failure in time rates.  The near zero optical impairments and zero signal modulation ensure a perfect match for all traffic types including RF, SONET, video or DWDM. The newly expanded portfolio of latching switches provides a wide variety of configurations which can be customized for use in a diverse set of fiber system architectures.

To see the live demonstration of the LS, LH and LX switching, visit the Polatis booth 274, Hall 7 at ECOC, Brussels Expo, Brussels, 2008, Monday 22 September through Wednesday 24 September.