At the same time, more traditional product categories, such as wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) and long-haul transport, will see their share of new and innovative products. In WDM particularly, moves are afoot to add optical switching and provisioning features, as well as to reduce costs to make the technology a feasible alternative to synchronous optical networking (SONET).
Metro WDM
Although it continues to struggle to make sales, WDM technology in the metropolitan competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) market is expected to take center stage at SUPERCOMM '99 as companies introduce new takes on the product. CLECs and other alternative carriers largely have turned their backs for the time being on WDM, mostly because the costs cannot be justified by new business. Others facing fiber exhaust in specific locations are opting for cheaper point-to-point systems rather than multicustomer rings, which require costly add/drop multiplexers.
"In metro," says Daryl Chaires, director of new business development, optical networks at Alcatel Network Systems Inc., Richardson, Texas, "customers have shown interest, but no large contracts have been signed, and there are no large deployments. This is primarily because of cost."
He says customers look closely at what their application will be when buying a product. For instance, a service provider may be able to justify the expense of metro WDM to relieve point-to-point fiber congestion because there is no need to purchase add/drop multiplexers for multiple network nodes. However, putting WDM in a ring with several nodes--each requiring an add/drop mux--may be too costly to get a return on investment.
Cheaper Metro
Alcatel will show for the first time the 1690 optical add/drop multiplexer, which was announced April 6. The company says the 1690 is a new lower-cost WDM product for metro applications with components developed specifically for metro systems rather than adapted from long-haul implementations.
Among the product's cost-cutting features is its ability to drop as little as one wavelength at a time. The 1690 actually filters out wavelengths in groups of four. Software is then used to further refine the drop to just one wavelength, and service providers can add more wavelengths as needed. Another cost-cutter is that multiplexers can be acquired in eight-channel configurations. As usage and revenues increase, new channels can be added in groups of eight to a maximum of 32.
The unit has interfaces at speeds from 10 megabits per second (mbps) to 2.5 gigabits per second (gbps), with the ability to interface directly to Internet protocol (IP) routers as opposed to going across SONET interfaces. The box can interface to asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), an IP router or SONET, and each service can be provisioned separately on a wavelength. The cost per channel, Chaires says, is from $25,000 to $30,000 for point-to-point, which compares favorably with low-cost products from ADVA Optical Solutions Inc., Ramsey, N.J. Alcatel also is considering development of a cost-reducing amplifier option for the product designed specifically for metro applications to lower the power output requirement to 10 decibels (dB), as opposed to the standard 14dB to 17dB for long-haul.
"The intent is to give a low number of features for the base configuration," Chaires explains. "Then, as we introduce other bells and whistles, the price will increase from there."
ADVA will debut a second product under its Fiber Services Platform (FSP) WDM product line at SUPERCOMM. The new product, the FSP II, is aimed at carriers facing fiber exhaust or wishing to add more services to an existing infrastructure. ADVA makes affordable ($25,000-per-channel link) WDM products that enable wavelength provisioning and has aimed its products at the competitive exchange carrier market and at enterprises.
The FSP II is a point-to-point product designed to be flexible enough to carry a wide variety of services, including underserved formats such as Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM Corp.'s ESCON channels (a communication protocol for IBM servers). It also can accommodate a wide range of data speeds, from 100mbps to 2.5gbps over eight to 32 wavelengths, and includes management and service-provisioning features.
ADVA says the product also has a migration path from point-to-point to managed ring topologies, with the ability to serve three or more enterprise facilities using only two pairs of optical fibers. The product will be generally available in the third quarter of 1999.
Fujitsu Network Communications Inc., Richardson, Texas, also will introduce a passive optical add/drop multiplexer for the metro WDM market. "When it gets down to taking cost out of dense WDM (DWDM) systems, you try to eliminate the active electronics as much as possible and activate multiplex/demultiplex," says Greg Wortman, Fujitsu's senior director of marketing. "You are left with narrowband SONET optics, and we will be showing a mix of OC-48 and OC-192 on the same system."
Optical Routing
Arun Jain, director of product marketing, Nortel Networks, Richardson, Texas, says "optical routing" or "optical provisioning" is one of the major trends in optical equipment. "Wavelength switching is the future. A true optical switch does not exist yet, but a bunch of smart people are working on it," he says.
Ciena Corp., Linthicum, Md., is expanding its product line into wavelength routing and provisioning and already has announced two key acquisitions that will help it execute that strategy: Omnia Communications Inc., Marlborough, Mass., and Lightera Networks Inc., Cupertino, Calif. Ciena says it will show how it will deliver on that strategy at SUPERCOMM.
"The bottom line is that DWDM will not be deployed much until we can get services out there, such as POTS (plain old telephone service), OC-3, OC-12, T1s, etc. It's one thing to have a big pipe, but you have to be able to get services on it," says Dennis Bilter, Ciena spokesman. Omnia and Lightera bring two key technologies to Ciena.
Omnia has access-delivery technology. Its product is essentially multiservice aggregation and distribution, but it puts the services it aggregates on wavelengths using ATM. This allows the different services to be separated more easily at their destination.
Lightera brings intelligence for the core for a WDM network, managing capacity and wavelengths and stitching them together. The Lightera product anticipates the continued development of SONET multiplexes and can support OC-768s when they are available. The Lightera Core Director, an optical core switch, replaces racks of as many as 40 separate OC-48 SONET multiplexers feeding a WDM multiplex with one network element. The Core Director not only replaces the muxes, Ciena says, it also acts in place of an optical cross-connect, a central element in all-optical networks, yet it is more economical.
Ciena says for now, Core Director is aimed only at the long-haul market, but if Ciena feels it can hit the right price points, it also could take it to the metro market.
Monterey Networks Inc., Richardson, Texas, will show the actual 20000 Series Wavelength Router product it introduced as a technology concept early in 1999. A number of the routers, with scaleable in-service switching capacity to beyond 160 terabits per second (tbps), are deployed in nodes to create a mesh optical core network that allows instant provisioning and 50-millisecond restoration of end-to-end paths across the network. Each 20000 Series Wavelength Router consists of a central switching subsystem connected to multiple distributed input/output subsystems. In the product's first release, the switching subsystem supports 640gbps of switching capacity in a single NEBS-compliant bay (equivalent to 256 OC-48 or 64 OC-192 wavelengths).
Services are delivered via a fast and reliable optical transport platform at wavelength granularities: OC-48 and OC-192. Monterey's Wavelength Routing Protocol (WaRP) lets providers specify levels of activation, availability, latency and restoration. These basic units of service creation can be mixed and matched to provide distinct multigigabit bandwidth service offerings.
Tellium, Edison, N.J., the optical networking spinoff of Morristown, N.J.-based Telcordia Technologies, weighs into the wavelength routing arena with the Aurora 512, an optical cross-connect solution. The company takes the position that the wavelength layer in networks now must provide all the monitoring and protection capabilities of the traditional electrical layers of SONET. In addition, optical cross-connects will be at the heart of every network, Tellium believes. It also believes that optical cross-connects have a role as edge devices, providing gateways and optical layer on-ramps.
Another entrant in the wavelength-router category is Optical Networks Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based, startup that announced its products in March but will show them for the first time at SUPERCOMM. Its products combine state-of-the-art optical transport capabilities with data networking technology to deliver true optical networks with wavelength-routed services.
Products include the Online 9000 transport platform, which provides fast switching, dynamic add/drop and flexible-rate hardware interfaces for all deployed optical channels in the system; the OPTX, an optical network operating system that provides a unified way to manage all network resources, hardware and software systems; and the OLMP (Optical Link Management Protocol Suite), the first network-level internetworking protocol to link the data layer to the optical transport layer to enable dynamic provisioning.
SONET and ATM
The convergence of SONET networks with ATM networks is a major buzz in the optical industry. The industry is looking for ways to go directly from the fiber itself to an ATM switch or right onto an IP network without going through SONET.
In a "sign that Fujitsu has a foot in both data and optical," Wortman says, the company will introduce a next-generation hybrid SONET/ATM product. The optical add/drop multiplexer (OADM) will have all the functionality of a SONET add/drop multiplexer as well as the functionality of an ATM switch. It actually has the switching fabric in it, though Fujitsu will not reveal details until the SUPERCOMM show.
The product is advantageous particularly for CLECs without extensive deployment of SONET. "CLECs' ability to leapfrog technology is very significant," Wortman says. The OADM allows a carrier to offer traditional voice as well as IP, frame relay and ATM service over the same network. The service provider decides which portion of a network will be data-aware and which portion will stay the traditional SONET. Bandwidth can be assigned on an STS-1 basis.
Ericsson Inc., Richardson, Texas, is also among those planning to introduce a so-called "hybrid" SONET add/drop product. Ericsson's Emax will have full time-division multiplexing (TDM) or full ATM capability. Transport includes optical high-speed and narrowband TDM, native ATM, frame relay and IP.
The Emax product will integrate functions such as the SONET ring interface, SONET add/drop multiplexer, lower-speed optical multiplexes and a digital cross-connect.
Ericsson characterizes the product as anticipating a data-rich future while providing full functionality within today's TDM networking. The inclusion of ATM helps "future-proof" the product for data-centric future networking needs, according to the company.
Long-Haul
Although it first announced its multiterabit optical switches in April, Corvis Corp., Columbia, Md., will introduce and demonstrate the products for the first time at SUPERCOMM. Without revealing any details of the underlying technology, Corvis officials say they will show a transparent optical network layer using intelligent switching and routing at network nodes without any optical-to-electronic signal conversions. According to the company, its products for the first time give service providers the capability to build a single-layer, transparent all-optical network.
The ability to switch, provision services and provide protection to networks without having to return the signal to an electrical level not only greatly increases functionality, but Corvis officials say it also will decrease costs by as much as a factor of 10. Corvis has received venture capital funding from a number of leading firms, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, and New Enterprise Associates. Dr. David Huber, the founder of Ciena, is the Corvis's president and CEO.
Fujitsu will demonstrate for the first time a router shelf that enables a 768-by-768 time-slot-interchange matrix that allows any-port-to-any-port connectivity for its Flash 192 SONET product. The product, which is the architecture used in long-haul applications, also includes forward error correction (FEC), which also is required in most long-haul products.
As an addition to this product, Fujitsu is planning to introduce full TSA/TSI (time slot assignment/time slot interexchange) capabilities with a 768-by-768 switching matrix. It has the ability to connect any port to any port, and to do so at STS-1 (equivalent to DS-3) granularity. "This product allows you to start to do some real optical cross-connecting, either in interoffice or local-loop applications," Wortman says. "It gives methods of managing SONET rings at an optical layer."
As for true optical cross-connects, there is not a large enough installed base of WDM wavelengths to justify the deployment of such an expensive and complicated device, Wortman says. "It is still going to be another couple of years before there will be significant deployment of cross-connect boxes," he says. "There will be small deployments. Also, when we get to a dynamic optical add/drop multiplexer, it will have properties of optical cross-connect and we will see it by the end of 2000, and that is where we will be starting to switch wavelengths."
In addition, Fujitsu will show the FlashWave 320 (320gbps, that is) WDM product it showed last year, but now with nonzero dispersion-shifted fiber in-line amplifiers, which are capable of 100-kilometer (km) spans and six spans in a row to allow 600km between regenerators. Wortman says the limit before this product was 80km between amplifiers and a cascade of four amps for a total span of 320km. "This is over [Corning Inc., Corning, N.Y.] LEAF fiber. You can only do six times 100 over LEAF fiber," Wortman says.
Both of the preceding products are using integrated narrowband OC-192 SONET optics, but Fujitsu also will show, for the first time, its own open transponders at OC-48 and OC-192 speeds. Open transponders can take any manufacturer's signal and put it on WDM. The market is about one-third open transponders and two-thirds integrated SONET optics. In addition, Fujitsu will have an OC-192 high-density regenerator for long-haul applications.
One of the more interesting products in the Fujitsu portfolio will be a tunable laser. The product is rather costly and is used primarily as a spare part, so a service provider does not have to buy a backup laser for each wavelength in a DWDM multiplex. The Fujitsu product can be tuned with software to as many as eight different wavelengths. Wortman says this technology is progressing rapidly, and within two years there will be lasers that can be tuned to almost any wavelength.
Transport
Cerent Corp., Petaluma, Calif., will show the Cerent 454 multiservice SONET transport system, a transport multiplexer product introduced in March for both wide area and metro networks. Terry Brown, vice president of field operations at Cerent, says CLECs are handling a significant portion of the data traffic coming onto public networks, but their ability to provide services is limited by the strictly incremental bandwidths provided in SONET networks and because those networks do not have multiservice capabilities.
Brown says the company chose a SONET-based strategy because "we feel that IP traffic will dominate at the access or edge portions of the network and ultimately we will see a public network that is primarily, if not all, fiber optic. But the day of all-optical networks is still some time off."
The Cerent product combines a SONET multiplexer with multiservice access. The company's box can take in traffic as diverse as DS-1s, DS-3s, frame relay, IP and ATM, and produce SONET multiplexes at a variety of speeds. It includes both cell- and packet-switching capability to aggregate traffic. Different SONET speeds, from OC-3 to OC-192, can be added by plugging in new boards. Cerent says this strategy can cut costs by as much as 50 percent. For a typical service provider, acquiring and installing all the network elements using traditional equipment would cost in excess of $1 million, compared to the Cerent solution, which costs approximately $500,000.
Access
RELTEC Corp., Cleveland, will offer a significantly enhanced version of its PacketSpan multiplexer for broadband access. RELTEC, which was acquired by Stamford, Conn.-based General Electric Co. plc March 1 for $2.1 billion cash, will change its name to Marconi Communications in time for SUPERCOMM. PacketSpan is a SONET- or synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH)-based access system that allows service providers to offer voice and high-speed data communications capabilities to small and large businesses over fiber access networks.
