Verizon offers peek at its network service road map

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Verizon is planning network upgrades that will support new services such as optical VPNs and high-speed home networking as well as reduce data replication among multiple services.

On its national optical network, Verizon is installing reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers and plans to migrate to wavelength switching to support automated operations and provisioning, said Mark Wegleitner, Verizon senior vice president and CTO. Wegleitner made his remarks last week during a keynote presentation at the Next Generation Networks 2005 conference.

Verizon is looking at generalized MPLS-based control in the optical layer to facilitate bandwidth on demand and optical VPNs, Wegleitner said.

"There's no reason you couldn't have an optical VPN" as well as an IP VPN, he said. He did not provide a time frame for an optical VPN launch.

Optical VPNs allow customers to self provision wavelengths - or circuits - into VPN groups even though they do not own the infrastructure. Customers also can upgrade capacity quickly from, for example, 52M to 2.5G or 10G bit/sec - the full capacity of a wavelength.

On the home networking front, Verizon plans to issue a gigabit passive optical network RFP by the year-end and to deploy the technology in the second half of 2006, Wegleitner said. The rollout will support gigabit-per-second upstream and downstream speeds, effectively doubling and quadrupling the bandwidth delivered by the broadband passive optical network technology in Verizon's fiber-to-the-premises consumer and small-business broadband buildouts, he said.

The new setup also will support full IPTV implementation, even though Verizon doesn't see that happening for another two years.

"We don't think IPTV is ready for prime time yet," Wegleitner said. "We are eager to embrace it when it's ready for deployment."

Verizon is deploying an overlay wavelength carrying an 850-MHz radio frequency signal to deliver broadcast TV into homes.

On a large scale, Verizon is looking to upgrade its network by integrating separate service silos - individual voice, wireless, data and video application server and database infrastructures - into a consolidated structure that eliminates server duplications and replicated PIN, message store, calendar and profile data, Wegleitner said. It also will enable the Verizon network to become access agnostic.

Wegleitner said Verizon has a "positive impression" of the IP Multimedia Subsystem specification for multimedia-enabling the public switched telephone network. But it still needs some attention, he said.