The Cisco® ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform (MSTP) provides a comprehensive, intelligent dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) solution for expanding metropolitan (metro), regional, and long-haul bandwidth. Product Overview The Cisco ONS 15454 MSTP offers an enhanced optical amplifier cardoperating in the C-band region of the optical spectrum to extend the reach and capacity of a metro, regional, or long-haul network. The optical amplifier cards are part of the Cisco ONS 15454 MSTP intelligent DWDM architecture engineered to reduce DWDM complexity and speed the deployment of next-generation networking solutions. The Cisco ONS 15454 enhanced optical amplifier card is a plug-in module that takes advantage of the proven Cisco ONS 15454 carrier-class features. This card delivers the reach and optical performances to support a single DWDM channel all the way to 80 channels today, to meet the requirements of service provider and enterprise networks. Table 1 outlines the C-band optical amplifier plug-in card types available for the Cisco ONS 15454 MSTP with the applications they are designed to support. The OPT-AMP-C takes advantage of the latest in amplifier technology, variable optical attenuators, photo diodes, and extensive software to facilitate a high degree of automation for simplified operations. The OPT-AMP-C features low-noise-gain blocks for C-band optical amplification requirements. For flexibility of application support, the amplifier can be used either as a pre-amplifier or as a booster amplifier. When used as a booster amplifier, the integrated OSC splitting and combining capability allows the OSCM unit to provide visibility and manageability of all the nodes of the network. The amplifier also provides fast-transient suppression to respond quickly to network changes without impairments and degradation of existing wavelengths. The amplifier integrates a software-controllable variable optical attenuator (VOA) to provide gain tilt control capabilities and to optimize the mid-access loss between the two amplification stages when different dispersion compensation units (DCUs) are used. The OPT-AMP-C provides optical safety functionality using the signal and OSC loss detection to help ensure user safety when operating the network, and complies with international standard requirements. The flexibility provided by the OPT-AMP-C card and the possibility to configure it through software to operate as a preamplifier or as a booster amplifier greatly simplify the operation of the Cisco ONS 15454 MSTP and reduce the number of spare units to be kept by the users. Midstage access loss (MAL) provided by the OPT-AMP-C card can be used, when the card is used as a booster amplifier, to perform chromatic dispersion precompensation at the transmit location, improving overall system performances - especially with high (such as 10 Gbps) and very high (such as 40 Gbps) bit rates and services. The optical amplifier card incorporates faceplate-mounted LEDs to provide a quick visual check of the operational status at the card. Printed on each of the faceplates is an icon, an orange circle, which is mapped to shelf-slot icons indicating the shelf slot where the card can be physically installed. The card is supported by the integrated Cisco Transport Controller craft manager on the Cisco ONS 15454, which provides the user access for operations, administration, maintenance, and provisioning (OAM&P) for the system. Selection and deployment of the Cisco ONS 15454 Enhanced C-Band Optical Amplifier (OPT-AMP-C) depend on the requirements of the network. The Cisco Transport Planner optical design tool is available to assist in the engineering, bill-of-material development, and deployment of the DWDM network.