CHICAGO, IL, Oct. 21, 2009 (Marketwire) --

CHICAGO, IL -- (Marketwire) -- 10/21/09 -- Transition Networks Inc., the fiber access technology expert, a wholly owned subsidiary of Communications Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JCS), today announced the introduction of a new 24-port Gigabit fiber access switch. This product is the newest member of Transition Networks' portfolio of carrier-class products intended to help service providers deliver and manage critical service offerings. The new fiber switch has been designed with OAM (operations, administration and maintenance) capabilities to ease the management of delivering Carrier Ethernet and/or triple play services.

"Service providers are constantly looking for cost-effective ways to deliver more services and bandwidth to customers while maintaining service-level agreements (SLAs)," said Patrick Schaber, Director of Marketing at Transition Networks. "The SM24-1000SFP-AH switch fits nicely into service providers overall strategy because of its cost, 10G uplinks and rich feature set."

The SM24-1000SFP-AH is a 1.5U form factor consisting of (24) 1000Base-X SFP ports, (2) 10G XFP uplink ports and (2) expansion slots for (2) additional XFP modules. The SFP and XFP ports accept industry standard optical transceivers. The SM24-1000SFP-AH has a standard operating temperature of -20°C to 65°C and has hot-swappable redundant AC or DC power supplies.

The SM24-1000SFP-AH switch also includes Carrier Ethernet specific software, QoS and Management features which enable service providers to deliver secure services while checking end to end connectivity for customers. The SM24-1000SFP-AH switch is the latest switch from Transition Networks designed to fulfill the needs of service providers.

Product Features and Benefits

Flexible Uplink and Downlink Options

The SM24-1000SFP-AH has (24) 1000BASE-X SFP ports to provide Gigabit fiber downlinks. In addition, the switch comes standard with (2) 10G uplink ports, with capability for 2 additional 10G uplink modules for a total of (4) 10G uplink ports, for connections to the core network.

Carrier Ethernet Specific

The SM24-1000SFP-AH switch was specifically designed for service providers deploying Ethernet services. Feature enhancements such as 802.3ah, Q-in-Q, Carrier Class Rate-Limiting, QoS, 9K jumbo frame support and subscriber isolation are added to help service providers deploy and securely manage the network services they are delivering.

Enhanced Security Features

The SM24-1000SFP-AH is designed to provide enhanced security and to prevent subscriber's network traffic from affecting overall network performance.