ONI and Telseon push scalable optical services

In a bid to satisfy the growing demand for scalable optical services in metropolitan areas, network equipment maker ONI Systems and service provider Telseon teamed up to announce on Thursday that they are adding OC-12 services to Telseon's roster of OC-48 and OC-192 flexible wavelength services.

The addition of OC-12 makes the services more attractive because they address a larger market, according to Michael Hulfactor, director of market analysis at Telseon, headquartered in Englewood, Colo.

"There are more companies that are looking for smaller amounts of bandwidth," Hulfactor said. "OC-48's an awful amount of bandwidth, and customers are very interested in having more flexibility."

The services are designed to deliver logical pipes and flexible usage models. The pipes can be reconfigured to carry different amounts of bandwidth (up to OC-48), address single or multiple application services through the same physical pipe, move services to different cities within Telseon's network, and simultaneously carry multiple protocols and services.

That strategy lets users upgrade their networks without carrying out forklift upgrades, thus reducing costs and slashing deployment times, according to Rohit Sharma, founder and CTO of San Jose, Calif.-based ONI.

Specifically, ONI and Telseon's offering is aimed at service providers and enterprises that are hamstrung by a lack of options for high-speed metro connectivity, Hulfactor said.

"If you're a service provider or large enterprise, and you have demand for more capacity or you get a new customer who's in a different metro, the usual model is to do a fiber build, if you have the capital, or go to an ILEC and try to get an OC-3 or OC-12 [connection]," Hulfactor said. "It would take months to provision that. And if you had a customer who went away, you would be stuck with that circuit."

Moreover, service providers have had difficulty building new facilities because of the economic downturn, Sharma added.

The services are currently offered only in the metro core, but they could be connected to long-haul networks, Sharma said. ONI and Telseon's service is available in 16 metro areas: Atlanta; Chicago; Dallas; Denver; Detroit; Los Angeles; Miami; New York; Orlando, Fla.; Phoenix; San Diego; San Francisco; San Jose; Seattle; Tampa, Florida; and the Washington-Northern Virginia area.

In the future, the two companies plan to accelerate the speed with which customers can enlarge the size of their pipes. The process takes several days now, but future enhancements to ONI's equipment could shorten that time to "minutes or seconds," Hulfactor said.

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