ABOUT
Company name:
Télédistribution Amos
Industry:
Internet and television service provider
Company website:
cableamos.com
Location:
Quebec, Canada
Télédistribution Amos is a digital cable television and Internet service provider located in the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region of Quebec. In addition to over 10,000 television subscribers and over 8000 home Internet subscribers, Télédistribution Amos also provides very high-speed fiber-optic Internet services to over 125 business customers. Jonathan Parrot is Network Administrator for Télédistribution Amos.
CHALLENGE
Due to its growing success, Télédistribution Amos has sought to expand its Ethernet switching capacity for its fiber customers. Amos already uses four NETGEAR switches for this purpose and is very satisfied with them. One of them, Amos Network Administrator Jonathan Parrot reveals, has been in use for over 2400 days (over five and a half years) without any intervention on their part — they have not needed to reboot the device a single time. Today, Amos uses 1-gigabit NETGEAR M4100 Series managed switches to directly connect its customers and uses a 10-gigabit M4300 Series switch as the gateway to aggregate flows and manage VLANs. This means that each customer has their own virtual network that is completely separate from other companies, guaranteeing the security of their data and enabling them to customize their service more easily. One of the challenges Amos faced was to simplify the management of these VLANs, which spanned multiple switches.
SOLUTION
To achieve this, Jonathan wanted to expand the capacity of his network. First of all, he looked for a 52-port switch.
“As I was very pleased with the performance and reliability of the NETGEAR switches that we had, including the latest M4300-series switches in production in other network segments, I went to the NETGEAR site to look at the latest developments in their range of managed switches. That’s when I found their 96-port, 10-gigabit M4300-96X modular switch. It was exactly what I was looking for — 96 ports in a single switch, a way to manage VLANs grouped together in a single switch, all at an attractive price, just as we’ve come to expect from NETGEAR.” Jonathan then printed out the product brochure, went to see his manager and got his approval within five minutes. He made a call to his preferred distributor, and received his new switch in no time at all. Since he was used to the M4300 unified interface, he installed and configured it himself and had it up and running right away.
Amos filled up the 96-port switch in 12 modules, and 64 of the 96 fiber ports are currently in use. The company is extremely pleased with the capacity of its new fiber network. Furthermore, the fact that the switch’s modules are hot swappable gives it exceptional availability. Perhaps this switch will beat the record set by the NETGEAR switch that reached 2400 days of use that we mentioned in the introduction. We hope so!
“The capacity and reliability of NETGEAR’s managed switches is impressive,” Jonathan Parrot says. 
“In our line of work, performance speed and optimum customer response time are crucial. The performance and flexibility of NETGEAR switches allow us to achieve these results all year round. The efficiency of the hardware and software in the M4300 switches is impressive: Despite our intensive use of the routing table and advanced features, the M4300 switches are non-blocking and never show any signs of wear.”
FUTURE
Amos has just ordered a backup M4300-96X switch so they can be prepared for any eventuality. And as the company keeps growing, we hope that they can increase their switching capacity even further in the future.
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