Service Provider Networks / (none) /

Optical gear closes gap between cost, revenue

By Jim Duffy
The Edge, 03/19/01

Two vendors are developing optical network products designed to narrow the gap between a service provider's costs and revenue growth.

Cinta Networks and Altamar Networks are making products that integrate optical switching and transport in the hopes that consolidating two pieces of equipment into one will entice service providers to open their pocketbooks in this capital-constrained environment.

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Citing data from market researcher RHK, Cinta and Altamar say service provider revenue growth is not keeping pace with equipment costs. The growth in costs is more aligned with the exploding growth of traffic, while revenue is on a flatter incline, the companies say.

"One of the underlying messages of the slowing of capital expenditure is that service providers have been building out networks, and yet the connections have become a commodity," says Michael Howard of Infonetics Research. "They do need to have more revenue."

To bring revenue more in line with costs, Cinta is unveiling the WaveJunction LS3000 Lambda Switch, an opto/mechanical switch with tunable lasers that lets service providers initially deploy it as an integrated transport/switching system, or incrementally add wavelength switching as required to a WaveJunction transport shelf.

The result is a savings of up to 50% in the initial costs and 80% in the operating expenses for wavelength transport/switching, Cinta claims.

Each WaveJunction switch performs one optical-electrical-optical (OEO) conversion. When a wavelength enters the switch from a dense wave division multiplexer, it is converted into an electrical signal for switching and traffic monitoring.

Once the switching decision is made and the traffic leaves the switch fabric, it is converted back into light on egress. WaveJunction is upgradeable to a MicroElectroMechanical Systems fabric once MEMS becomes "reliable and cost-effective," Cinta officials say.

MEMS makes most sense at OC-768 rates, they say. Anything below that is suitable for electrical switching, company officials say.

WaveJunction is capable of supporting more than 4,000 ports per node, at line rates of 2.5G bit/sec OC-48 to 40G bit/sec OC-768, and switching capacity of up to 160 terabit/sec, Cinta claims. WaveJunction switches can be configured in optical ring or mesh topologies, and will support Generalized Multi-protocol Label Switching later this year for topology discovery.

Links can be restored in 20 milliseconds to 50 milliseconds, Cinta claims.

WaveJunction will also support the Optical Internetworking Forum's user-to-network interface for "on-demand" circuit provisioning.

WaveJunction is entering customer lab trials within the next 30 days. General availability will be in the summer. The first release of the product will have 256- and 1,024-port switch fabrics. The 4,000-port fabric will emerge in the fourth quarter.

While Cinta is focused on thousands of ports, Altamar is talking millions of ports. The Ditech Communications subsidiary is rolling out what it calls the Titanium Optical Network System for long-distance nets.

Like WaveJunction, Titanium is an integrated transport and switching system that Altamar claims is expandable to two million OC-48 ports, with a total switching capacity of 5,500 terabit/sec, or 5.5 petabit/sec. This density is intended to keep the cost of providing data services low for service providers. Current generation equipment cannot scale cost-effectively to support traffic growth, Altamar claims.

As a result, the cost of delivering data services is going to go up to the cost of voice services, says Rob Newman, executive vice president of market development for Altamar.

"Carriers will either stop putting equipment in or pass that cost off to the business customer," he says. "Customers will either pay a lot more or just not get what they want."

Established vendors, fast risers and scores of other start-ups - such as Cinta - will compete with Altamar, which is a potentially daunting challenge. But so far, no one is proposing the kind of scalability Altamar is, analysts say.

"It really is an order of magnitude beyond what we're seeing in the market - if they can do it," says Nancee Ruzicka of The Yankee Group. "As you add traffic, at some point it gets much harder to manage the complexity and the volume of the traffic in the switch fabric. So that will be the real test because on a device like this, you're really putting your whole network on it."

Titanium features three shelves - transponder, switch and optical - that fit into a seven-foot bay. The switch is electrical and performs two OEO conversions before traffic exits.

The amplification shelf sports Erbium-doped fiber and Raman amplifiers for signal spans of 1,000 kilometers without regeneration. It also performs mulitplexing/demultiplexing and dispersion compensation.

Titanium incorporates a feature called Virtual Rings, which is designed to replicate SONET's resiliency. When Titanium establishes an optical connection, Virtual Rings will automatically calculate a back-up connection.

If the primary connection fails, the traffic will be rerouted to the back-up connection within 50 milliseconds, identical to a SONET protection scheme.

Titanium uses an "[Open Shortest Path First]-like" protocol to establish the Virtual Rings, Newman says. The system will support Generalized Mutli-protocol Label Switching in its second release - slated for the third quarter of 2002 - for meshing.

Meshing will let service providers minimize the amount of bandwidth reserved for network protection and thereby make a larger percentage of the overall network capacity available for revenue-generating traffic, Altamar says.

Production shipment of Titanium is scheduled for the first quarter of 2002. Altamar says the cost to deploy 4,096 OC-48 Titanium ports is about $83 million.