Excerpted from the June 21, 2005 edition of fibertoday.com with the permission of David Chaffee

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Yesterday was magical for Amedia Networks, as the New Jersey-based switched Ethernet FTTP provider revealed its first customer: China 's Tai Long Communications.

Amedia has been working hard for its first clients and has been on a bit of a ticking clock so the news of the multimillion dollar job servicing up to 50,000 subscribers with networks capable of 100 Mbps was certainly good.

A relieved Frank Galuppo, Amedia's President and CEO, said Amedia is “thrilled that Tai Long has selected Amedia and embraced our switched Ethernet-based solution.”

Galuppo said the win validates Amedia's decision to focus on low-cost operations, symmetrical 100 Mbps services, and service-quality guarantees. “We were also quite proud that our equipment inter-operated exceedingly well with other vendors' soft switches and layer two/layer three switches,” he noted.

As Galuppo and members of the Amedia team will tell you, nothing comes easy in this business, and while the opportunities are increasing, so is the level of competition.

Tai Long CEO Xian Qing Zhang said Amedia was selected only after a “thorough and intense search for a FTTP equipment vendor.” Zhang said Amedia was picked because of its stability, reliability and “high throughput,” which, he said, exceeded that of the offerings of all the many other vendors the company reviewed.

The award first of all gives breathing space--but also momentum--to Amedia, which is a public company via its buyout of a public company that was going out of business. Having recently moved to Eatontown , N.J. , Galuppo and company have been working hard to get that first order.

While the job no doubt will be a logistical challenge, it is sure to provide credibility and presence to the vendor, which licenses Lucent technology. The contract could be worth up to $9 million over the next two years.

While some might be disappointed that the vendor did not land a job closer to home, Tai Long Assistant to the CEO Dong Su characterized China as being “the fastest-growing and most promising market in the world for ultra-broadband access. “The market for FTTP in China is just getting started and will draw global interest for many years to come; it's a market in which we intend to assume a leadership role,” said Su.