MEL Gears Up for a Global Presence for Its WDM-PON and G-PON/E-PON Hybrid System Sales by Opening an Office in California with an Appointment of Chief Marketing Officer

LOS ANGELES, June 10, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- MEL today announced an appointment of its chief marketing officer (CMO), Dr. Donald P. Yu, a former top executive at the Hanjin Information System and Telecommunication in Korea and now doing research at the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, University of California at Irvine as a visiting scholar. "Dr. Yu comes with a broad-based experience in computer communications with senior management positions with various enterprises including Luminmax Group International (USA), Unisys (USA), Korean Air and Hanjin Information System & Telecommunication (Korea). As the CMO overseeing global marketing operations, Donald will lead MEL into a globally recognized business as the world catches up with WDM-PON technologies and implementation. We are very pleased to have him aboard MEL," said Dr. Byoung-Whi Kim, CEO of MEL. Dr. Yu stated, "I really welcome this great opportunity in promoting WDM-PON technologies in the Americas region, and it is time for telecom professionals to understand and appreciate potentials and benefits of implementing this WDM-PON technology. The negativity of cost factor behind the reasons for not adopting this PON technology is not well founded. With demand in quantities, the cost issue will be a non-issue and we'll see adoption of this WDM-PON soon in USA and Canada. In practice, however," he added, "the adoption will come gradually from hybrid implementation of WDM-PON with G-PON or E-PON." Donald will be stationed in Brea, California, focusing on all Americas marketing and sales operations as well as the gateway to global marketing operations.

MEL's original technology is the wavelength reuse WDM-PON, where the optical signal modulated with downstream data is re-used so as to carry the upstream data through the Reflective Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (RSOA) in the CPE by a series of noble processes. As this scheme removes the Broadband Light Source (BLS), which constitutes a core element in competing WDM-PON technology offerings, it alleviates system complexity and operational burden inherent with the high-power dual BLS. With this RSOA-based "Reuse" scheme, MEL provides a simpler colorless DWDM architecture, offering significant cost-effectiveness and efficient wavelength resource utilization.

MEL's other key technology is the tunable external cavity laser (ECL) with waveguide Bragg gratings, based on Polymer and Silicon materials which support color-free OLT and ONU tunable transceivers (data rate up to 2.5Gbps 16 and 32-channels). An additional ECL technology is now commercially available, where the output wavelength is determined by a wavelength assigned patch cord (named as lambda-connector) while the SFP remains the same for up to 40 channels on ITU-T 100GHz spacing grid in either C-band or L-band.

Recently, MEL released hybrid PON products, which link WDM-PON as trunk with G-PON (or E-PON) as existing access network on the Physical Layer (OSI Layer 1). This provides an efficient, practical central office consolidation, offering opportunities for smooth migration of G-PON (or E-PON) to WDM-PON. MEL's products include Wavelength-tunable Fiber-ECL SFP (WT-16 and WT-32) for WDM-PON OLT/ONU, Wavelength-reuse SOA SFP (WR-16 and WR-32), and Wavelength-tunable G-PON or E-PON hybrid (WTG16 and WTG32 or WTE16 and WTE32) for WDM/TDM-PON Hybrid OLT/ONU. The first commercial service based on this WDM/TDM hybrid PON system was introduced to broadband subscribers in the city of Gwangju in Korea by Korea Telecom (KT). KT provides select Gwangju city residents with the hybrid 32-ch OLT-ONU WDM-PPON and E-PON hybrid architecture on 1:32 split ratio for 1,024 (32X32) subscribers at a distance of 20km.

About MEL

MEL (Make Everything Linked) is a start-up company founded in 2009 by former ETRI (the federally supported telecom research institute in Korea) researchers with initial support of private investors and a funding from ETRI. MEL focuses on development of optical data transport components, which enables the operation of WDM-PON-based passive optical network. MEL also manufactures WDM-PON and TDM-PON (i.e., G-PON and E-PON) interface equipment, thereby supporting the WDM-PON overlay of G-PON or E-PON architecture. Within 1 1/2 years of operations, MEL has introduced a suite of WDM-based passive optical network (PON) components for WDM-PON markets in Korea and globally. For more information, visit http://www.mels.co.kr or http://www.mel-wdmpon.com/.

Media Contacts:
Donald P. Yu
[email protected]
(714) 529-1885 (Office)
(714) 519-4943 (Mobile)

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SOURCE MEL