Optical equipment vendors at SUPERCOMM spread a message that politicians and couch potatoes holding the remote already know: It's all about power and control.
In this case, that's power in delivering products with a lot of functionality, and the control of provisioning optical bandwidth quickly and controlling at a granular level how those resources are parsed out, where and to whom.
With most of the long-haul infrastructure already in place, optical equipment vendors in Atlanta focused largely on the need to feed the backbone. Those companies featuring metropolitan access and core networking solutions in Atlanta are too numerous to mention here, but here's a flavor of what was seen and heard at the Georgia World Congress Center.
PacketLight Networks Ltd. (www. packetlight.com) debuted an optical solution for metropolitan networks that brings down carrier costs by supporting a variety of protocols on a single packet fabric. The product, which has a built-in lambda switch, can put any service or combination of services on any wavelength.
"Some existing solutions do protocol-specific wavelength assignments, but carriers want the edge as simple as possible and don't want cards to be protocol-specific," says James Chitowski, vice president of sales. "We can do any protocol--TDM, ATM, IP, SONET, frame relay or whatever--and over a single 2.5gbps wavelength." The PacketLight solution does SONET restoration, supporting bidirectional line-switched ring configurations, and will coexist with future non-SONET-based protection.
The theme of supporting multiple protocols, services and product functionality on one box was at SUPERCOMM.
"Our goal is to integrate into CityStream the functionality of seven previously 'free-standing' network elements, namely the add/drop mux, cross-connect, ATM mux and edge switch, frame relay access device and DWDM multiplexer, and soon, IP router--to create more metro LAN-type services," said Arun Bellary, chairman and CEO of Metro-Optix (www.metro-optix.com), in a prepared statement.
Metro-Optix unleashed at the show a flurry of new announcements about its OC-192 interface on its CityStream product; new ATM switch capability, now available; a gigE LANstream interface, with end-of-year availability; and its CityView element management system, now available.
According to Dana Hargraves, Metro-Optix vice president of product marketing, the company is rounding out its protocol offering. Now it can support TDM, IP and ATM on one shelf. "We're able to have any protocol, any port," she says, adding that makes for a smoother migration away from TDM-based networks to IP.
Meanwhile, Luminous Networks Inc. (www.luminous.com) showed its recently unveiled PacketWave C Series, which is an upgrade to the PacketWave M Series, first introduced at last year's show. The C Series combines DWDM, routing, Ethernet interfaces and TDM in a single box.
"C is M cut in half and turned on its side, and can be AC-powered and can be deployed on the customer prem," says Jay Shuler, Luminous vice president of marketing and business development. "It's primarily for MTU and business parks. It also can also be used in cable headends, which are AC-powered."
Key metro applications include private-line TDM transport, metro/private-line Ethernet transport, DWDM, and VPN service. The new product, which starts at about $40,000, has a 2.5gbps ring capacity in both directions and supports MPLS with label distribution protocol (LDP), the tag assignment mechanism for multiprotocol label switching.
Lightscape Networks Ltd. (www.lightscapenetworks.com), an ECI Telecom Company, also highlighted a multiservice, multiprotocol solution in its 10gbps metro XDM platform. The company's demonstation involved transmitting multiple traffic streams, such as 10gbps OC-192/STM-64, lower rate SONET/SDH/PDH, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and video over the SONET/SDH and DWDM networking fabrics of the XDM. The XDM's DWDM networking supports simultaneous transmission of OC-48/STM-16 (2.5 Gbps) and OC-192/STM-64.
The Proper Adjustments
While many vendors offer powerful one-box solutions for multiple services, Movaz Networks Inc. (www.movaz.com) delivers network operators power with a different twist. The company differentiates its DWDM metro solution, in part, through its automatic power equalization feature. Power equalization is typically time-consuming and requires technicians to do manual adjustments of the power level of each wavelength on attentuators at customer premises and PoPs. The Movaz product, however, does all that remotely and automatically for faster provisioning, says Zouheir Mansourati, vice president of product management.
"Amps are a key cost issue for optical networks," he adds. "So we developed our own erbium-doped optical amplifiers, which fit on the Movaz line drivers, making it two to three times less expensive because it's integrated."
PacketLight's product offers similar functionality. The fact that the product handles one lambda at a time means network operators can amplify the signals one wavelength at a time, thus reducing amp requirements. That's a significant savings, notes Chitowski, adding that amps typically sell for $15,000 to $60,000.
Splitting Hairs
While big bandwidth and multifunction optical boxes address many issues carriers face, that doesn't mean a lot unless network operators comb through the traffic running through these boxes and divide it up where and when it's needed.
For that reason, the ability to groom and add/drop multiplexing (ADM) traffic is paramount. While ADM offers the ability to pull traffic out of the payload at specific destinations, grooming is a combination of ADM and switching.
The product announced at SUPERCOMM by PacketLight consists of a remote terminal with service cards and a box that grooms signals to enable the carrier to aggregate traffic, but also allows the carrier to divide traffic based on destination. The product also can do "hairpinning" for add/drop multiplexing.
OptiMight Communications Inc. (www.optimight.com) says carriers can add and drop signals on a per-wavelength basis using its OMC 1600 Product Suite.
Another metro core company debuting last month during the Atlanta-located show was Polaris Networks Inc. (www. polarisnetworks.com), which launched its OMX multilayer, multirate optical transport switch.
The company says the product hails the third, more intelligent generation of optical switching. The product, to be available for trial in the fourth quarter, does grooming at the SMS level and also supports MPLS.
"When you're in the core of the metro, that's where the majority of grooming is required," says Sab Gosal, senior director of product marketing at Polaris.
Gosal says that with OMX, carriers can build out infrastructure for gigabit Ethernet service with restoration. "We have a line-switched array patent that can do line-level protection," he says. "We also do path-level protection to reroute individual flows."
According to Polaris, the existing network model--which includes a router, possibly with 100gbps capacity, an ATM switch with about 50gbps throughput and a 30gbps digital cross-connect--doesn't work anymore. Instead, OMX offers an ATM switch, digital cross-connect and MPLS capability in one box that leaves all traffic in its native form. Entry cost for the product is expected to be in the $200,000 range.
Coining Connections
The Iris Group (www.irislabs.com) and PhotonEx Corp. (www.photonex. com) also drove home the point that when it comes to equipment, bigger isn't necessarily better.
Four startups working together as the Iris Group at SUPERCOMM highlighted the group's Optical Data Network Hierarchy (ODNH) architecture, which employs a technique the companies say disproves the notion that optical networks require huge, complex wavelength-granularity cross-connects.
The concept has been coined as Optical Channel Concatenation (OCC), which combines the capacity of multiple optical wavelengths into a single pipe, or "Superchannel" of up to 40gpbs to 160gpbs or greater. The Iris Group in April submitted OCC for consideration as a standard to the T1X1 Technical Subcommittee of Committee T1, says Michael Zadikian, Iris Group founder and CEO of Metera Networks Inc. (www.metera.com) of Richardson, Texas, one of Iris Group's four subsidiaries.
"Why can't we go across wavelengths in a fiber?" posits Zadikian. "We found a way to do it. Take some number of 2.5 or 10gig channels and do concatenation. The notion is concatenation will allow a bit to travel across channels simultaneously."
A carrier could use this ability to connect a switch port to a transport system, for example, he explains. That means there's still the challenge of how you transport this. So the group came up with Waveband, which delivers a wider slice of the optical spectrum to transport these Superchannels. "When you put yourself inside the optical cloud, all of a sudden you don't have thousands of wavelengths to deal with it," he says. "So as a result of the Waveband, you have fewer ports at cross-connect points and at add/drop muxes, so the network is easier to manage and you need less equipment--that flies in the face of creating 10,000 to 50,000 [port] optical cross-connects. You don't need those devices anymore."
Some vendors are announcing 4,000- to 5,000-port cross- connects, says Zadikian. But he says carriers that don't have the physical space for such products won't adopt them. "You have to come up with a smarter way, and we believe this is a smarter way," he says.
"Also, I don't need a 2,000-port router. If you look at all successful routers, the number of ports didn't change; what changed was the speed of the port."
A better architecture would be to have packet switches with the same number of ports, but faster ports--on the order of OC-3072, he says.
Iris Group is proposing the introduction of ODCN devices between the optical layer and the core backbone, like Cisco Systems Inc. (www.cisco.com) and Juniper high-end routers.
"We want to switch flows between devices out there today," says Zadikian. "At the same time, we believe this is the right device to do restoration because it knows whether traffic is committed, so it can do tradeoffs on traffic requirements."
"It offers two levels of protection. There are two physically diverse paths across the country. And if there is a laser problem, then Superchannel only loses one channel so you have 93 percent of your capacity left so you don't need to reroute. So you don't need cross- connects then to do restoration either."
The Iris Group includes Metera, which is developing access/metro-area optical systems; Latus Lightworks Inc. (www.latuslightworks.com), also of Richardson, which expects to sell optical backbone systems; and Coree Networks Inc. (www.coreenetworks.com) of Tinton Falls, N.J., which is working on core optical networking products. Iris Labs Inc. (www.irislabs.com) of Plano, Texas, meanwhile, is defining the architecture and network management strategy for the group and providing the Iris startups with operational--legal, accounting, human resources, etc.--expertise. Formal product introductions from the Iris Group will be made later this year and throughout 2002.
Elsewhere at SUPERCOMM, the Ultrafast Dynamic Core architecture unveiled by PhotonEx introduced the concept of "stream-based" core optical networking, which enables public network operators to provision bandwidth in a more granular fashion, rather than being locked into offering, for example, 2.5 or 10gbps chunks to customers.
"If I can slice my bandwidth more and more finely, I can create services at price points that are more attractive to more customers," says Phil Francisco, vice president of marketing at PhotonEx.
The company had a private suite near the show floor at SUPERCOMM in Atlanta, where it demonstrated equipment and related network-management tools based on the architecture. The architecture consists of IntelliCore System Software, which opens the control domain and provides for needs-based services delivery. That sits on the PX-Ultra Hardware, which will begin at 40gbps and eventually support 80gbps and beyond.
Most existing vendors are simply adding more wavelengths that will enable carriers to get more capacity out of their fiber, says Francisco. But in addition to increasing bandwidth, service providers need to be able to provision bandwidth on demand to make more efficient use of their strategic asset of fiber and to offer additional services to drive revenue, he says. "Most WDM [products] are 40 to 80 wavelength systems today, so once you sell all of the 40 wavelengths, you're done" even if the customers aren't using all of the bandwidth they've bought," Francisco says. "[Service providers] can only sell off 2.5 or 10gigabit bundles of traffic, so it's not really tuned in to what the customer might want, it's more tuned to what technology is available."
Stream-based optical networks, meanwhile, can offer core bandwidth in smaller increments. "You could offer services from 1gbps up to tens of gigabit per second and could vary it in real time," he adds.
Selling bandwidth only in large chunks can result in deferred revenue for the service provider because enterprises will wait as long as they can to delay adding another major infrastructure expense to their books. If they can instead buy bandwidth as needed, customers would be more likely to make the leap earlier, says Francisco. "While this might not increase revenue, it wouldn't defer it as is done with tiered process today," he asays.
PhotonEx will deliver this stream-based optical networking capability over three phases. Phase one will include the delivery of core backbone optical transport and switching solutions supporting 40gbps to 80gbps wavelengths/channels and 3.2-terabits-per-second capacity. It will include 2.5gbps, 10gbps, 40gbps and 10gigabitE interfaces.
In phase two, still a wavelength-based approach, it will open the control plane to allow edge devices such as ATM switches and IP routers to communication with the optical core backbone. Francisco says the company is active in various standards committees that are working on optical control plane issues. "But we're moving from using GMPLS as way to manage wavelengths to using it as a way to manage streams," he says.
In phase three, the company will allow for service creation in the core through stream-based optical networking. The company expects to begin betas of phase one products this quarter, with customer shipments expected by the end of this year. Announcements discussing products supporting phases two and three will be made later this year.
While much of the action in optical networking at SUPERCOMM was focused in MANs, several vendors did come out with news or enhancements in the core-switching space.
Sycamore Networks Inc. (www. sycamorenet.com), for example, announced enhancements to its core-switching product, the SN 16000. The product is now higher-scale, can do sub-50-millisecond restoration and support generalized multiprotocol label switching (GMPLS) and the OIF UNI spec. The previous 16000 was a 64-port version. With the enhancements, available now, the 16000 switch fabric can handle the equivalent of 512 OC-48, says Rick Thompson, Sycamore director of product marketing, and with future enhancements will be able to grow to 1,024 ports.
Meanwhile, TeraBurst Networks Inc. (www.teraburst.com) unveiled a product blending optical/electrical and all-optical switching. That means it is bit-rate and protocol agnostic, like an all-optical switch, yet offers the reliability and control of an OEO switch.
And Nortel Networks did the first live demonstration of its OPTera Connect PX photonic switch, leveraging early versions of emerging architectural standard automatic switch transport network (ASTN) and GMPLS with its Smart Optical Network Solution.
SS8 Networks (www.SS8.com) debuted its SS8 ServiceController, an IP service control point that will serve as the base platform for delivering core network services such as local number portability, OneNumber, voice VPNs, "800" and "900" number translation and conferencing.
"We believe there is a concept of core and edge services in a next-generation network," says Tom Kershaw, SS8's vice president of product management. "Everyone wants to talk about deploying services at the edge, and that's important. But there is core data that goes over the edge applications [and needs] to maintain total availability." The ServiceController houses that core data and enables edge applications to plug into the core and share the service logic, eliminating the need for service providers to provision that service logic in all of their edge devices. The SS8 ServiceController works with SIP and H.323 platforms, including SS8's SignalingSwitch. The ServiceController includes various components, including a signaling interface, call model, service logic execution environment, service management system, and service creation environment. Kershaw says the product is in field trials at several customer sites and is expected to be generally available this quarter.
BellSouth (www.bellsouth.com) introduced a service level for its Managed Firewall solution, which is a solution that supports up to 100 IP addresses and includes all appropriate hardware and software from industry leaders such as Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (www.checkpoint.com), Nokia (www.nokia.com) and management services from Internet Security Systems Inc. (www.iss.net).
Lucent Technologies Inc. (www.lucent.com) announced enhancements to its PacketIN Solutions portfolio and Softswitch that will facilitate service providers' creation and management of enhanced services on IP or converged networks. Among the enhancements are upgrades to the PacketIN Application Hosting Environment, which includes a new SIP proxy server to enable carriers to deliver services deployed on their network to all IP end points, including IP phones or mobile Internet-enabled devices. There is also a new mediation capability that will support emerging APIs, including Parlay and the 3G Partnership Program's Open Services Architecture. Lucent also introduced a multiservice VPN as part of the PacketIN Solutions portfolio.
In other SUPERCOMM news, Lucent introduced 7R/E IP Business Services, a hosted IP Centrex solution service providers can offer their enterprise customers. The 7R/E IP Business Services solution incorporates the Lucent iMerge Centrex Feature Gateway and the Lucent VPN Firewall Brick 201.
The Clarent Next Generation Network solution from Clarent Corp. (www.clarent.com) is now available. The NGN is a software-driven suite of products designed to migrate carriers from circuit-switched to packet networks. The solution comprises three main elements:
Clarent NGN Softswitch--the centerpiece of the solution that delivers tandem and Class 5 Internet offload functionality;
Clarent Backbone High-Density Gateway--a carrier-grade media gateway; and
Clarent Applications Platform--a combination of the Clarent Announcement and Clarent Applications Servers.
P-Cube Inc. (www.p-cube.com) expanded its IP Service Engineering family of products. The new P-Cube Service Engine 100 (SE100), in conjunction with the P-Cube Service Management Platform, extends the reach of IP Service Engineering to a wider range of PoPs. The SE100 is a purpose-built, service-aware network element that integrates with existing network access, aggregation and transport elements, and OSS/BSS systems using standard interfaces.
