Tropic Networks, one of the earliest entrants into the growing ROADM space, announced at GLOBALCOMM its newest offer based on wavelength selective switch technology.
Uniquely, the eight-degree ROADM has been architected to accept WSS components from two – as yet unnamed – vendors to provide some technology investment protection to service provider customers.
With the addition of the WSS, Tropic Networks offers customers the option to mix and match blocker and WSS technologies in the network, said Robert Lane, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. “Because our primary market is cable companies, not every location needs WSS, but they do in places where they are distributing video,” he said.
Tropic Networks rolled out its first ROADM based on wave blocker technology in 2003, and it has been installed and carrying live traffic since in service provider networks since early 2004.
Tropic Networks waited to introduce its WSS version purposefully, said Lane. The conditions for the launch included volume manufacturing capacity and viable cost points for the components as well as customer demand.
“The whole industry is moving to ROADM,” said Lane, noting price points for blocker-based ROADMs command only a 10 percent increase over fixed counterparts. “My view is over the next five years all metro DWDM will be ROADM.”
Of course, the end game for customers is to gain flexibility in the configuration and management of their optical networks with the addition of all-optical mesh networking.
“The more flexibility you introduce, the more problems you introduce,” he said, noting that, without monitoring, ROADMs cannot achieve their full potential benefit to the network operator. To this end, Tropic Networks has integrated its Wavelength Tracker solutions into the new WSS. “Wavelength Tracker identifies optical signals across the network. This is important because I can look at the health of the signal,” Lane said, explaining that it looks at the signal power on every element the signal goes through on a wavelength-by-wavelength basis. This is in contrast to most systems that only check signal loss on entry and exit. Additionally, he said, service providers can access these statistics from a Web portal, isolating points of failure or trouble.
Tropic Networks www.tropicnetworks.com
