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ST. LOUIS, August 15, 2011 - Actelis Networks® (Booth 315), the leading global supplier of Ethernet over copper solutions that is accelerating everything for municipalities and government agencies, today announced at the 2011 ITE Annual Meeting and Expo that the Montgomery County Department of Transportation (MCDOT) has deployed the company’s Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) over copper networking solution as a major upgrade to the Maryland county’s aging automotive traffic system. Actelis’ advanced communications solutions, including its environmentally hardened ML2300 aggregation switches, ML680 and ML624 Ethernet access devices (EADs), are currently being deployed by MCDOT to connect the county’s new IP-based traffic controllers to its centralized Traffic Operations Center (TOC). The deployment has created a more sophisticated and reliable transportation network that helps free up traffic congestion for the county’s nearly one million residents, including many dignitaries who live and work in the area. As one of the nation’s most influential geographical regions, Montgomery County is located just north of Washington D.C., and also is home to some of the nation’s leading biotechnology companies, corporations and federal agencies.

With the help of Actelis, MCDOT is able to easily monitor and troubleshoot more than 5,000 lane miles, over 4,000 neighborhood roads, 1,000 miles of emergency roads, and 50 miles of interstate across the county’s 500-square-mile area. Centralized intelligent traffic management can be performed by MCDOT engineers from the county’s TOC or onsite by plugging a laptop computer into any of Actelis’ Ethernet access equipment. As a result of the upgrade, Montgomery County’s revitalized transportation network is a much more intelligent, flexible and reliable communication system, according to Michael Kinney, senior engineer at MCDOT.

“With this upgrade, we have made our operation very proactive to changing traffic conditions. We make adjustments to traffic controllers 50 to 60 times a day, so it’s very important to have centralized access to all locations and our communications network functioning flawlessly,” said Kinney. “When dignitaries, for example, pass through the county, we can easily adjust the timing of controllers to make traffic flow smoothly and without interruption.”

One of the key criteria for selecting Actelis’ ITS solution was the company’s environmentally hardened product line and connectivity advantages, which provide MCDOT with more service options while still reducing costs. The built-in flexibility of Actelis’ hardened systems inherently reduce operational and capital expenditures, since they eliminated MCDOT’s need to deploy additional external switches, according to Kinney, who also believes that Actelis’ copper-bonding capabilities not only provide MCDOT with the greatest broadband rates and reach, but also the built-in resiliency of having multiple copper pairs per system is critical to keeping communications working flawlessly and traffic running smoothly.

“After evaluating different brands during the selection process, we were extremely impressed with Actelis’ best-in-class resiliency and broadband rates,” said Kinney. “Actelis’ hardened systems provided greater flexibility in service deployment options, which helped to eliminate additional costs typically associated with other less robust solutions.”

Municipalities across America are at a crossroad, looking for pragmatic, long-term solutions that will quickly upgrade the nation’s infrastructure, whether telecommunications or roads and bridges, according to Joe Manuele, executive vice president of worldwide sales and customer service at Actelis.

“Ethernet technology is becoming the de facto standard for leveraging existing communications networks, with its ability to economically and easily provide all of the bandwidth and reliability necessary for next-generation services,” said Manuele. “Actelis’ ITS solution remains miles ahead of the competition, continuing to meet the infrastructure needs of cities and counties across America.”