Adva enhances optical mux

Adva is introducing at SuperComm 2003 in June optical multiplexer capabilities that give customers more options when using both coarse (CWDM) and dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) on the same platform.

In addition, the company is introducing a customer-site box to deliver optical services to businesses from metro service provider networks.

The company’s Fiber Service Platform (FSP) 2000 already supported both CWDM and DWDM, but the addition of new filters enables creation of a hybrid WDM that supports both on the same fiber. This enables carriers to introduce new wavelengths to a fiber in smaller increments using CWDM rather than jumping fully to DWDM, saving 35% of the capital cost, Adva says.

The new filters will be available by mid-year.

For example, a single fiber on the 32-port FSP 2000 can support two wavelengths or channels using wideband wavelength division multiplexing (WWDM). That wavelength count can be pushed to five by adding a coarse multiplexer-demultiplexer. Adding a second one would push the number of wavelengths to eight, Adva says.

Replacing one of the coarse mux-demuxes in the eight-wavelength configuration with a dense mux-demux supports 20 channels. This is an interim step to installing two dense mux-demuxes to bring the single-fiber channel count to 32.

Initial installation of the gear is 40% to 50% less than buying an all DWDM box, Adva says. In addition, customers that want to use both DWDM and CWDM can do so on one platform, saving the cost of training people to use both and of monitoring and maintaining another box.

Adva is also introducing a smaller version of its FSP 3000 platform called FSP 3000 Slimline (SL). The device is designed to sit at customer sites and link up with service provider optical networks.

FSP 3000 SL is intended to enable metro service providers to cost effectively sell wavelength services, such as Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet and FibreChannel. The FSP 3000 SL chassis holds two channel cards, rather than eight on the FSP 3000.

Adva says the device could be used to link data centers for backup and disaster recovery, enabling transfers of 60T bytes of data in 1.5 hours. It could also support wire-speed LAN interconnections.

A standard FSP 3000 ranges from $10,000 to $50,000 to support both ends of a link depending on the number of channels and application cards. An FSP 3000 SL is about one-third the cost per channel, the company says. It is available in May.