SPOTLIGHT: ADTRAN speaks up

Last week, ADTRAN invited a select group of media down to Huntsville, Ala., for a visit.  The event included a customer panel, an overview of voice and data products, and some pre-briefing on new products; the first product unofficially announced this week is a 3G board, er module, that goes into the NetVanta 3305 modular router.

The most impressive and humbling part of the event was a tour through the company's extensive facilities. ADTRAN employs over 1,700 people, and most of them reside in Huntsville, including technical support, engineering design and testing, and manufacturing - yes, manufacturing in the good old USA.

ADTRAN manufactures all of its pre-production prototypes and about 30 percent of its products on site in Huntsville on its own manufacturing line. (The other 70 percent is done in China, but using the exact same quality control standards as are implemented in Huntsville).

It is easy to take the process of creating a new product from scratch for granted; after walking through the assembly line and testing labs of ADTRAN, it is hard not to be in awe of the number of different disciplines and practices that go into the process of building a physical (i.e. hardware) product.

You'll find three slide shows of the various manufacturing facilities Fierce toured-

SLIDESHOW: Visiting ADTRAN - The Assembly Line
SLIDESHOW: Physical Testing at ADTRAN
SLIDESHOW: Visiting ADTRAN - Network and apps level testing

In addition, we have an "easter egg" capturing ADTRAN's press hospitality embedded in the ADTRAN gets Real editorial over at FierceTelecom.