Traditionally a cornucopia of new products, SUPERCOMM 2000 will be overflowing with optical richness as the show opens its doors in June. The optical arena has seen an explosion of new thinking and products, inspired by the extraordinary demand for bandwidth in every form imaginable.
The show is highlighted by new startups that span the optical access and network edge to provide multiple services from a single platform. These products represent the beginning of a revolution in optical networking, the first steps toward replacement of multiplexed SONET rings with optical pipes carrying a mix of ATM, IP and even TDM traffic.
It also is the first SUPERCOMM that will see viable true optical switches as announced products.
Metro DWDM
Metro DWDM has almost completely emerged from its status as a stepchild to core DWDM, as products appear that have been designed from the beginning to serve the demands of the metro environment.
Ericsson (www.ericsson.com) will announce a new addition to its Erion line, the Erion Metro, which provides several different node sizes on the same hub at a central office. "A carrier has to collect traffic for that hub node and typically needs smaller sizes out in access," says Ola Persson, director of product management, Ericsson Optical Networking. "So we have a node for just one or two channels."
As the availability of fiber is sometimes an issue in the metro sector, Persson says, the Erion Metro solution allows the use of a single fiber rather than requiring a fiber pair. "It depends on the actual carrier situation how attractive it is," Persson says, "but we believe that, even if there is a trend toward larger bundles of fiber, this will still be attractive in a number of locations." Customer trials on the Erion Metro will begin in the second quarter of 2000, with general availability expected in the third quarter.
Lucent Technologies Inc. (www.lucent.com) will show its all-metro DWDM system. The product began shipments in March to three customers for trials, and Lucent plans to announce a European customer at SUPERCOMM. Lucent also will announce relationships with a number of software developers that work with ASPs for applications such as simplifying storage farms, which would use its metro network. Lucent had announced late in 1999 the Optistar OC-48 and OC-192 products to provide optical networking to products, such as routers, that usually have electrical connections. The company has been working since then with leading storage providers, such as Dell Computer Corp. (www.dell.com) and IBM (www.ibm.com), to bring fiber connections to servers and storage devices.
Ciena Corp.'s (www.ciena.com) metro DWDM offering deals with the issue of optical services in the metro space to enable carriers to deliver optical services in native format at the edge, such as gigabit Ethernet, ESCON and fiber channel. The company has two products. The first, MultiWave Metro, puts 24 protected wavelengths on a fiber network. The second, MultiWave Metro One, provides one wave on a ring that might have multiple wavelengths but drops off just one. The application is generally broadband IP.
Optical Access
The optical networking world is abuzz about the flock of startups that have announced new products to provide multiservice networking on optical networks. Some are products that replace ADMs (add/drop multiplexers); others are scaled to sit in the basement of a building and aggregate everything from T1s to gigabit Ethernet onto a single wavelength. First announced at the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC) in Baltimore in mid-March or in the ensuing weeks, many will be shown to potential customers for the first time at SUPERCOMM.
Appian Communications (www.appiancom.com) will show its Optical Services Activation Platform, OSAP 4800, a multiservice optical edge product designed for building and office park applications, "activating services at the intelligent optical edge," says Anand Parikh, vice president of marketing and business development. It can map services, such as IP, ATM and frame relay, to VT1s (virtual transport 1s, at 1.544mbps), giving great flexibility in bandwidth. The OSAP sits at the edge of an optical network, but the platform does not have to be at both ends of a transmission. It can communicate with routers, frame relay and ATM switches at the other end at an ISP or CLEC's PoPs or COs. The "trunk" between the two can be a SONET multiplex or a wave. Input from multiple customers on that side can be T1s or T3s, and 10Base-T, 100Base-T or gigabit Ethernet. The initial product supports one wave per chassis.
"There is a lot of talk about the wavelength services," says Greg Wortman, vice president of marketing for Fujitsu Network Systems (www.fujitsu.com). "The real question is whether there is a business case." First, can a single customer or even a single building, really make use of a whole wavelength, considering not very many enterprises have a gigabit Ethernet switch on their premises. The second question is how to manage such a service with multiple customers and multiple feeds. "It's not trivial," says Wortman. "We have been working with our customers for two years on the issue of how to run a multiservice network from an operations perspective. It is a lot easier if you are a CLEC, but in the world of public networks, CLECs represent a very small portion of the marketplace."
Although SUPERCOMM will be a showcase for new optical access solutions from startups, not all believe the edge is the hotbed of the action. "We think the next large amount of contracts will be in regional DWDM, 1000 kilometers to 2000 kilometers," says Kathy Szelag, vice president of marketing, for Lucent's optical networking group. "That needs a cheaper version of DWDM, and that is where everyone is putting fiber. The startups are not addressing that. It is the Nortels [Networks Inc., www.nortel.com] and Lucents of the world."
The future is "the generation that is in the lab now and will provide direct IP interfaces over a wavelength," says Wortman. "We are already seeing from startups a lot of talk about IP over photons where there is no SONET or they are using thin SONET or just SONET framing on the interface. Clearly all of us are going to move in that direction. First step is to go to thin SONET and the next step is to go to no SONET, but we are still a long way away from that in our opinion."
"But more significant than a product or a box is the architecture issue," Wortman continues. "The really big deal is to make IP telco work efficiently and reliably. The industry still has to sort out issues about how it is going to deal with latency issues across the network."
Optical Services
Much of the energy in optical services has come from small startups, such as Atmosphere Networks Inc. (www.atmospherenet.com). However, some of the large carrier providers also are adding "datacentric" capabilities to optical systems.
Rick Dodd, director of marketing at Ciena, says, "One of the big themes for this year is what we call 'optical services'--being able to deliver, not just optical transport, but bandwidth any time, any size and any priority, having that flexibility rather than the pure transport we get today. It's not just variety, but the dynamic ability to deliver bandwidth very quickly, and within a range of priorities."
Atmosphere Networks will introduce two new modules that extend the capabilities of its FSN 1200 multiservice optical access platform. The M310 circuit-emulation service module (M310 CES) hands off 28 T1s or 21 E1s to carrier COs and other high-density sites. The physical handoff is software-selectable as OC-3, OC-1, STS-1 or DS-3 interfaces, so carriers can stock one module for a variety of applications. The M310 provides grooming at the DS-0 level, which allows carriers to groom partially filled T1s into completely filled T1s, eliminating the need for external digital cross-connect equipment.
The second module, the DS-3 ATM UNI (user network interface) tributary card, provides an ATM interface for carrier backhaul and ATM switch handoff applications. The module will be of interest to carriers that make extensive use of low-density DSLAMs. The 2-port DS-3 ATM UNI provides an interface that lets the carrier connect a DSLAM (which multiplexes DSL lines into an ATM stream) into the Atmosphere fiber optic ring. With the DS-3 ATM module, the carrier can collect DSLAM traffic from a large number of sites around a ring and provide a path back to a central switching point. The module also saves bandwidth by sending only active bandwidth back to the carrier's central switch.
Alidian Networks Inc. (www.alidian.com) operates at what the company calls the "metro gap," between long-haul networks and the access network. It will introduce the WavePack, which produces multiprotocol wavelengths that can comprise IP packets and ATM cells, all running in native mode rather than in TDM time slots or ATM packets. "The ability to put multiple services helps make DWDM cost-effective and maintain quality of service levels," says Ted Rado, Alidian's director of marketing. Alidian will also show the WaveMux, which scales transport infrastructure from a single OC-48 to many multiples of that, and dynamically moves services among wavelengths.
Astral Point Communications Inc.'s (www.astralpoint.com) ON 5000 essentially replaces the elements of a SONET network with intelligent nodes. "We could be categorized as a multiservice provisioning platform," says Raj Shanmugaraj, Astral Point's president and CEO. The nodes operate as well in mesh or point-to-point environments as in ring configurations. The nodes process traffic as packets. Each node offers interfaces for 400 copper DS-1s, 120 DS-3s, 64 OC-3s with 1+1 APS (automatic protection service), 16 OC-12s and four OC-48s, with four OC-48 network ports and a minimum of four transponders. Communication between nodes is OC-48s in the first product release.
Chromatis Networks Inc. (www.chromatis.com ) also operates in metro networks between the access and the core, which has been dominated by SONET. The company has two products, the Metropolis 2000, which sits at the edge of the network and connects to DSLAMs or in large multitenant buildings, but is not generally an access product; and the Metropolis 4000, which sits at the core and collects traffic from multiple 2000s. They combine electrical switching, such as ATM and a SONET ADM, as well as DWDM functions. The product has 5 gigabits of switching capacity over 32 waves.
Luminous Networks Inc. (www.lumnet.com) is another startup in this arena that offers circuit voice and native IP services as gigabit IP over fiber.
Rapid Provisioning
The frustration over waiting for optical capacity, whether in the access, edge or backbone portions of the network, has been the inspiration for a number of solutions that provide rapid service provisioning.
In the access portion of the network, many of the startup multiservice technologies also feature strategies for rapid service provisioning. The Appian OSAP platform will use the optical domain service interface (ODSI) to signal elements in an optical network, such as ADMs, that it requires more bandwidth.
Ciena's Lightworks Toolkit is software that lets the carrier define a set of optical services and provision bandwidth, using a point-and-click tool.
Ericsson's new metro solution will include a digital cross-connect for that market as an aid for rapid provisioning. Whereas in the long-haul market, 512 or even 1,000 ports is considered de rigueur. "We think it's just as important to be able to scale down and provide an entry solution," Ericsson's Persson says. Ericsson is offering a three-board 16-port cross-connect. "The reason we are doing this is because we believe there is a need for interconnecting rings and enabling traffic provisioning and restoring services end to end," he says. The cross-connect comes in both a standalone version and an integrated card that slides into the company's current DWDM node chassis. The cross-connect will be generally available in the fourth quarter.
All-Optical
"Optical switching is the hottest topic at the moment, and three or four new startups have announced this capability, such as BrightLink Networks Inc. [formerly Corvia, www.brightlink.com] and OMM [Optical Micro-Machines Inc., www.omminc.com]," says Lucent's Szelag. "So I expect there will be a lot of optical switching on the floor at SUPERCOMM."
However, don't expect working products, say industry observers. These products are at the announcement stage. Some of the leading providers of optical networks, such as Lucent, have selected technologies for development into systems, but they are far from completed products, or even from demonstrations in most cases.
Rather, a few vendors will be talking about their "vision" for all-optical networking, says Kent Novak, vice president of marketing, Alcatel Inc.'s (www.alcatel.com) optical networking division. "The reasons are, one, so the overall message gets fair attention. Also, few vendors can provide an overall solution. We expect that there will be Lucent or Nortel also telling this story, but it is a very elite group of suppliers that can present this solution," he says.
Although some of the pieces of all-optical switching of wavelengths are falling into place, such as optical cross-connects, other technologies are still in development, such as switching from one color to another. "The reality is we still have to do an optical-electrical-optical conversion," says Szelag.
Lucent, which announced its LambdaRouter optical cross-connect early in 2000, will announce software to allow the optical cross-connects to communicate with each other. "They do intelligent self-discovery, so, if there is a problem, they can route around it," says Szelag.
Alcatel Inc.'s optics division has a relationship with Agilent Technologies Inc. (www.agilent.com) to develop that company's optical cross-connect. The cross-connect uses technology borrowed from Hewlett-Packard Co. (www.hp.com) inkjet printers.
But, Agilent is not the only game in town, says Paul Harrison, vice president of product strategy, optical networking division, transmission systems division for Alcatel. "We are looking at their technology for use in an optical cross-connect. Right now they don't have any exclusive right to be in the final design. We went with them because of their market lead in this type of technology. If they can sustain that lead, chances are good that they can get designed into the final product. We are using the technology to build a prototype and move ahead with systems design, but we are looking at other technologies. If anything happens with Agilent's technology, we have to be sure we have backups."
A "close second" to Agilent, he says, is micromirror technology from companies, such as OMM Inc., and technologies in development by Corning Inc. (www.corning.com) and Astarté Fiber Networks Inc. (www.starswitch.com).
The importance of a true optical cross-connect, Harrison says, is its bit-rate independence. While the switching fabric of a traditional cross-connect can process a finite number of bits because it touches the traffic itself, a true optical cross-connect switches streams of any size as light, with no sense of the payload. "We want to leapfrog electrical technology to optical because it is bandwidth independent," Harrison says.
The 40-Gigabit Core
One of the inspirations for all-optical networking is that optical backbones are getting bigger and are demanding pure bandwidth crunching. Even without all-optical networks, however, vendors will be showing products that scale up to the hitherto unreachable 40-gigabit core.
Lucent will show a new metro DWDM, but the company's focus is clearly on high-speed core networking, and it will showcase 10gbps, and even 40gbps, core networking infrastructure. While the LambdaRouters themselves may not be part of the demonstrations, Lucent will demonstrate the other components of its 80-wave intelligent optical meshed network, integrated with various OC-192 products, in a live network.
The company also plans to show the 10-gigabit version of its WaveStar Data Express, a product aimed at ISPs and ASPs that it announced at the Optical Fiber Conference.
Fujitsu will show a four-channel tunable laser, called the FlashWave OADX, to provide laser spares in a DWDM network. Demonstrated as a technology last year, the laser will now be a product at the same price as an OC-192 module. "Until we commercialize tunable lasers, we will not see DWDM systems with a high channel count," says Wortman, "because service providers can't keep that many spares around."
Fujitsu will introduce the Flash 2400 ADX, which it claims has the highest density OC-48 ADM of any on the market. The Flash 2400 has a footprint two to three times smaller than comparable equipment. The ADM has interfaces that range from DS-3 to OC-192, and a built-in cross-connect of 864 by 864 STS-1s (51mbps), which makes it able to perform hubbing functions between subtending rings. "You will be able to mix and match rings that hub in OC-3, OC-12 or OC-48," says Wortman. "This is the Cerent killer." (Cerent Systems is now part of Cisco Systems Inc., www.cisco.com.) The SDH- or SONET-compatible ADM has software provisionable interfaces.
"This is really part of a portfolio of next-generation transport products that are migrating customers' networks from relatively simple SONET transport networks to being able to build a foundation for all-optical networking as well as multiservice networking," says Wortman. "The next-generation Flash products offer a way for CLECs to provide both traditional T1 and T3 services, as well as data services: 10, 100 and gigabit Ethernet on a converged network, on a single fiber pair. It provides a solid business case for a CLEC to go out and provide a wide variety of services off of a single network."
The company's product road map over the next two years for its DWDM networking platform is to be able to scale to 170 channels, or 1.7 terabits, using both the C band (center band) and the L band (lower band) of DWDM wavelengths. Products to be introduced by the fourth quarter of this year will start with the ability to span 600 kilometers without generation and go to 1,200 and 2,500 kilometers. The company also plans a configurable optical ADM to be available early in 2001. Another future product is a digital "wrapper," which is out-of-band data that allows the user to monitor network performance without touching the traffic itself.
While equipment gets bigger, it also has to become simpler according to Ciena's Dodd. "We see that as a big part of the value proposition of our Core Director product and one of the big themes at SUPERCOMM: collapsing of SONET muxes. Ciena's Core Director has all-optical interfaces with an electronic switching fabric, which gives granularity and muxing capability. "That is what allows us to basically do the functions of the SONET ADM," says Dodd. SONET muxes, digital cross-connects, switching and routing functions are all done in a single device, eliminating the expense of multiple devices.
It also reduces operational costs. "That story was not interesting two years ago," when a key issue was scale, Dodd says. "Systems are of such density today that we have moved on to second-order problems, such as how to operate more efficiently."
Ciena also will show Transparent Service Muxing, a feature that allows carriers to sell "virtual fiber" services. A carrier may want to sell a number of OC-12s but pack them in an OC-192. To sell them as "virtual fiber" services, the SONET overheads for each OC-12 have to be preserved and passed through the network transparently, which this feature accomplishes.
Optical Air
Although others have shown the capability, AirFiber Inc. (www.airfiber.com) will show a complete "fiber over the air" system at SUPERCOMM. The AirFiber system uses lasers at the 780 nano-meter frequency to transmit up to an OC-12 over the air for 200 to 500 meters. Further, the system can operate in a mesh configuration for protection and restoration in the event of an outage. The system's 30-inch-tall roof nodes each have four steerable transceivers that can be aimed at other nodes. New nodes are automatically acquired by the management system and track each other to stay aligned. AirFiber says the mesh configuration and robust performance enable the system to deliver "five 9s" performance. A hub node connects to an ATM switch and then to a fiber.
