Woburn, MA, February 09, 2009 -- Boston Applied Technologies, Incorporated (BATi), a leading provider of ultra-fast photonics devices, announced to become a charter member of the Advanced Fiber Connectivity and Switching Forum (AFCS), a strategic group focused on accelerating the adoption and deployment of fiber connectivity and optical switching solutions into networks worldwide.

AFCS is a coalition of industry-leading service providers, optical switch vendors, network infrastructure providers and manufacturers including Verizon, AT&T, NTT, Tyco, ADC and others. The AFCS Forum will initially study the application of physical-layer switching and management tools to perform the following tasks remotely: fiber provisioning, fiber protection and restoration, and fiber test, monitoring and troubleshooting.

BATi's Nanona^TM optical switch has unique position in physical layer switching due to its nano-second speed and <1dB insertion loss. It provides an intelligent management and virtually non-interrupt data transmission in optical fiber network. It is a solution to solve foreseeable problems in fiber network maintenance with a large number of DWDM channels. The down time of the affected fiber route can be reduced dramatically; therefore, tremendous reduction on the operation cost.

With the advance of information technology (IT), many carriers upgrading their networks to accommodate the heavy load of data and video traffic will need reliable fiber management systems to minimize the impact on customer service. They are turning to optical switching technologies to keep up with growing bandwidth demands. "Optical switching is the cornerstone in the vision of the physical layer and is crucial for the next generation network," said Kevin Zou, President of BATi. "BATi will work with other AFCS companies to drive the innovation of automated fiber cross connects."