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On a beam of light
Scott Bradner, 'Net Insider
 If I were to pick a product category of the year, it would have to be DWDM. There would be no contest.
For many years now, computers and other electronics have been following Moore's Law with power and memory doubling every 18 months or so. (As has the size of applications such as Microsoft Word.) At the same time, wide-area fiber capacity has barely increased at all. But in the past few years, wave division multiplexing started to grow the ability of fiber to carry data at a rate approaching Moore's Law. With DWDM, fiber capacity for the first time has leapfrogged Moore's Law and is growing even faster than most other technologies.
Quick look
Selective WDM
Chromatis Network
Pricing: Not available
Market status: Product not yet announced.
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| WDM is the technology of multiplexing multiple data streams onto a single fiber by using different colors of light, called Lambdas. Up to now, most WDM and DWDM products have been targeting the long-haul market since the cost/benefit tradeoff is so clear in those cases. Adding a new fiber to an existing cable path between Boston and Chicago, for example, is very expensive, even more so if all of the space in the existing conduit has been used. Putting WDM equipment on each end of the existing fibers creates many new fiber-equivalents, each one capable of carrying the same traffic as a separate fiber in the pre-WDM world for far less cost than installing the new fiber. The cost tradeoff has not been as clear in metro areas, particularly where many individual sites do not need the full bandwidth that a Lambda provides.
Chromatis' Selective WDM technology allows a service provider to mix and match connections to the individual sites based on the bandwidth each requires -- from a small fraction of a Lambda to full Lambdas. This permits a service provider to put in the infrastructure to support the WDM that it will surely need at some point in the future, assuming its service and sales force are both good, without requiring the sites that do not need WDM to pay for it. Carriers will accomplish this by running a normal SONET ring in part of the fiber's bandwidth and WDM in another, all in a single integrated package.
To me, anything that facilitates the deployment of the infrastructure that is needed to support the bandwidth-hungry networks of the future is a good thing.
Related links
Bradner is a consultant with Harvard University's University Information Systems. He can be reached at sob@harvard.edu.
'Net Insider archive
Chromatis Web site
Net Resources: DWDM
Technology overviews and related info.
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