Celebrating 10 years of TPoP Smart SFP!

October 1st, 2014 was the first day AimValley and OE Solutions successfully produced a TPoP Smart SFP device.

Some History

It all started with developing the TPoP E1 in February 2014 as a project we did with one of our customers, a world-renowned Network Equipment Manufacturer. At that time we were wondering if it would make sense to develop an E1 product in a rapidly declining market in which the latest product generation was first released 10 years ago.

Well, it turned out that there was, and still is, an increasing market to keep these old systems alive and that products that can emulate a part of such a service over newer networks, are key! These products are known as network migration or circuit emulation products.

As the TPoP E1 created interest right away, we also developed the TPoP T1 device for the North American (#SONET) market in 2015 and later on the TPoP T3 in 2021.

So how successful is the TPoP?

Over the last 10 years, we have produced tens of thousands of TPoP SmartSFPs of which 75% was a TPoP E1, our SDH variant for the European and Asian markets.

We have shipped the TPoP Smart SFPs to over 50 customers.

Why do we think this market continues to grow?

• Existing (larger scale) emulation solutions on the market are declared End of Life (EoL) as these products have been around for many years.
• New products are no longer equipped with network migration cards but are only supporting Ethernet.
• Line Interface Units (LIUs) required to make electrical E1/T1/T3 signals are no longer produced.
• Products in the SDH core stopped working as they are at least 15 years old and need to be replaced with something new, almost always an Ethernet or MPLS switch.

As one of our customers wrote:

"SDH is still beloved and responsible for much of our critical infrastructure communications. It will continue to fade but, like all transmission technologies, be around for decades to come!"

So, who wants to predict when E1/T1 services become End of Life?

Evert Konings - Product Line Manager Smart SFP at AimValley

Learn More

Visit the dedicated Smart SFP website to learn more about our full range of Smart SFP devices.