Adtran announced Tuesday that it purchased Sumitomo Electric’s EPON business for North America, broadening the networking communications equipment vendor’s SD-Access portfolio.
The deal also provides Adtran with technology license and OEM supply for North America, South America, EMEA, Australia, and New Zealand.
Adtran said the EPON solutions will be integrated into the company’s SD-Access portfolio to further support the needs of its cable MSO customers.
Under the agreement, Adtran will take over sales, customer relationship, distribution, support, manufacturing and development rights for the EPON solutions in target markets outside of Japan and Asia.
“Sumitomo Electric EPON products have been the market leader over the past twelve years in Japan, the last four years in North America and are a strong fit for Adtran to integrate into our industry-leading SD-Access portfolio,” said Jay Wilson, SVP of technology and strategy at Adtran, in a statement. “These products come to Adtran with large, installed deployments within leading MSOs, including the top two North American cable broadband providers. We will build upon Sumitomo Electric solutions to further accelerate the MSO market’s adoption of our open, programmable and scalable architectures, enabling them to accomplish their strategic network priorities.”
As part of the deal, Sumitomo Electric will bring Adtran’s SD-Access portfolio, including its Mosaic cloud platform, and NG-PON2 and Gfast technologies to the Japanese and Asian markets.
The companies said these technologies will help cable MSOs shift to distributed access architectures as they look to deliver multi-gigabit services. Both companies will also work together on future PON and SDN technology developments.
Howie Abramson, formerly with Sumitomo’s North American subsidy, was newly appointed to VP of engineering at Adtran. Abramson, along with a team of Sumitomo Electric sales, engineer and support staff will now join Adtran.
“Adtran is the right partner for Sumitomo Electric, because of its long-term trust from Tier-1 Telco and MSO customers in North America, and also because of its leadership in a complementary product portfolio and its unique experience with deploying and maintaining remote electronics. We look forward to the collaboration between our teams that will result in more competitive solutions for our customers,” said Hiroaki Nishimoto, general manager of broad networks division at Sumitomo Electric.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.