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Reflecting that trend at SUPERCOMM will be a number of new product introductions, many targeting metropolitan networks, as well as an interoperability event staged by the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF, www.oiforum.com).

"Optical networks have been historically very manually intensive to manage," says Adam Dunstan, president of the OIF and vice president of technology at Avici Systems Inc. (www.avici.com). "That's improved. But with much of the new traffic being data and IP traffic, our [OIF] members conceived it would be powerful if you could have the data equipment control the optical infrastructure."

With this concept, a router or an ATM switch, for example, automatically could request bandwidth from the optical layer, rather than having someone at the carrier provision the optical network manually, Dunstan explains, allowing much faster service delivery to the customer.

While allowing data devices to control the optical network layer is a concept that's not even trial-ready, says Dunstan, the OIF hopes to drive the idea forward by developing a specification called OIF UNI (user network interface) and staging a live, multivendor interoperability demonstration based on that UNI spec at SUPERCOMM in Atlanta.

Dunstan says OIF UNI addresses the problem of long provisioning times both in the local loop and on the optical backbone. "To get a T1 in the Northeast takes 10 weeks typically, so many companies place three orders to three carriers and see who gets there first," he says. "OIF UNI will let data equipment better use optics so carriers can sell any bandwidth service in a very short period of time."

As of xchange's early April deadline, the UNI spec had been through the straw ballot stage and was expected to be finalized in the second half of this year. Meanwhile, the OIF was doing closed-door testing with vendors to make sure products would work at the SUPERCOMM demo, so names of the companies to be involved in the OIF UNI event were not available at press time. However, the demo is expected to include optical cross-connect switches, wavelength routers, metro optical devices, IP/MPLS routers, ATM switches, SONET/SDH multiplexers, and other devices that will interface to, or form part of, the core optical transport network.

In addition to the OIF effort, several individual vendors at SUPERCOMM are emphasizing rapid provisioning of optical bandwidth in multivendor networks.

Randy Fuller, vice president of marketing at Emperative Inc. (www.emperative.com), says the theme of rapid provisioning to reduce cost and get revenue flowing faster has been a big challenge for multivendor networks, specifically in the metro core optics space. To address those issues, Emperative has come out with an automated service provisioning tool for multivendor networks called ProvEn Optical, which allows carriers to build, change and manage optical circuits and services over those circuits, whether they're based on SONET, WDM or a combination of the two. According to Fuller, most other vendors are focused just on circuits, requiring a separate box to handle Layer 7 applications. He adds that ProvEn Optical, which is Java based, is flexible, so carriers can simply use its drag-and-drop environment should they need to add new interfaces.

Syndesis (www.syndesis.com) is also focused on optical provisioning at SUPERCOMM; it will be announcing its new NetProvision Optical product designed to do multivendor service provisioning for communications providers seeking to deliver a broad range of differentiated services over optical networks.

NetProvision Optical automates provisioning of multidomain optical services, with the selection of endpoints and a set of service attributes (protection pattern, QoS) that can be entered specifically or chosen from predefined service profiles. When the service is created, NetProvision computes the optimal path between these two points based on an automatically maintained inventory of network elements and services. NetProvision Optical also supports internetworking between optical networks and the value-added services running over them, which is required for network layers to exchange the information necessary to provision services and notify the provisioning system of one layer when modifications are made to the topography of another.

Fast provisioning and multivendor interoperability will also be key messages that Ciena Corp. (www.ciena.com) is putting out at SUPERCOMM, says Rob Adams, director of network management at the vendor.

At last year's show, Ciena introduced its ON-Center OSS product. This year it will have the actual production product at the show, Adams says. The product suite has been enhanced to include element management, network management, multivendor service-level management and multivendor provisioning.

"At SUPERCOMM we'll be discussing adding multivendor provisioning--for example, provisioning through a competitor's edge box through our core device," Adams says, noting that Ciena expects to participate in the OIF event. He says he's not sure if Ciena will actually do a live demo of its equipment interoperability with third-party boxes, but says it will show interoperability between its Ciena MultiWave CoreDirector core optical switch and the metro edge concentrator it recently obtained through its Cyras Systems Inc. acquisition, which was completed March 29.

Metro Solutions

Meanwhile, several vendors are unveiling or enhancing optical switches at the show, many of which are focused on the metropolitan networking space. Dunstan says the optical network industry's new focus on the metropolitan portion of the network will be evident at SUPERCOMM.

"It's become common knowledge in the last month or so that big spending on long-haul optics is going away," Dunstan says, noting that most North American carriers already have completed their optical backbone buildouts. "Most carriers are not using anywhere near the capacity of their backbones. So in the next 18 months, [I expect to see more focus on] having the ability to get more capacity in buildings--so getting traffic on the backbone." Many of these products address SONET ring requirements, but at the same time do data processing, he says.

Quantum Bridge Communications Inc. (www.quantumbridge. com) at SUPERCOMM will do the first live demo of its QB8000 Optical Edge Switch, which it announced at the recent Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) show in March, and by June is expected to be generally available. Also part of the demo will be the company's QB5000 and QB3000 products. All three products are managed under Quantum Bridge's QBVision Service Enabling Management System.

Steve Hersey, managing director of technical marketing for Quantum Bridge, says the QB8000, which scales to 32 wavelengths and supports 2.5 per wavelength (scaling to 10gbps per channel), is optimized for the access network. "Low cost is a focus of it," he says. "It's coming out 20 to 30 percent less expensive than ADVA [Optical Networking, www.advaoptical.com] or OPTera-type stuff [from Nortel Networks Ltd., www.nortelnetworks.com], and we're half the physical size."

The platform can deliver from 1 megabit to 2.2 gigabits of data at any rate, and in any format or protocol. Hersey adds that the fact that the QB family of products can support DWDM over passive optical networks (PONs) is also a key differentiator and enables it to support such applications as storage area networking and survivable data transport (for data backup, for example, using a ring architecture).

Some vendors say PON, which eliminates active elements on the loop, offers cost savings up to 10 times that of SONET and is reaching cost parity with DSL and hybrid fiber coax (HFC).

Another new PON product to be announced at SUPERCOMM comes from Alcatel (www.alcatel.com). The 7340 will be demonstrated in Atlanta running voice, data and video over a single fiber. This fiber to the home product consists of the OLT at the CO and the ONT at the customer residence. It supports four POTS lines, a 10/100Base-T Ethernet connection and interfaces to the home via a 75-ohm cable TV connection. Based on the Full Service Access Network (www.fsanet.net) standard, the 7340 targets greenfield and overbuilder applications, says Mark Klimek, director of marketing and business development at Alcatel's advanced systems group.

Another PON fiber to the home product to be announced at SUPERCOMM comes from Optical Solutions Inc. (www. opticalsolutions.com). FiberPath 400 provides Internet access at 40mbps to each customer premises, with bursts up to 100mbps, plus streaming IP video, 80 channels of analog CATV, digital CATV and telephony services. The product features the FiberDrive head-end bay, a passive optical network, and a broadly patented subscriber premises node. FiberDrive functions as a switching station--it takes voice, video and data feeds from the service provider's CO, and transforms them to digital signals that are launched optically to subscribers via a PON. At the customer premises, a node reverses the signals--translating them to conventional telephone, computer and television interfaces.

Meanwhile, optical startup Coriolis Networks Inc. (www.coriolisnet.com) expects its OptiFlow 5500/5000 (for high-density CO applications, supporting multiservice TDM and data), 3500/3000 (a low cost trunk unit for CO or CPE applications) and 1000 (CPE for various Ethernet-based applications) products to be generally available by SUPERCOMM.

The company says its solutions will enable service providers to recover 75 percent of stranded bandwidth generally found in SONET networks and to parse out bandwidth as desired for voice and data applications. The company's OptiFlow Network line of products is based on an architecture Coriolis calls Optical Spatial Division Multiplexing, which shapes the way information is packaged inside SONET and WDM transport. Voice is still slotted into virtual tributaries as with traditional SONET solutions. But instead of using only traditional SONET hierarchies for data, Coriolis recovers stranded bandwidth by breaking down the SONET or WDM bandwidth into a contiguous block of bits so customers can set up bandwidth "frame relay style" for committed data rates plus bursty data. The products statistically mux bursty traffic so a service provider can oversubscribe the bursty data. As a result, service providers can offer different classes of service or can look at packets themselves and discover the kind of service required or who originated it and decide on the fly what priority to give it. The system prioritizes traffic using MPLS and DiffServ QoS standards.

Coriolis' products also look at all the data streams from all the nodes on the ring and manage requests for bandwidth instantaneously from any node. And they transport information in native protocol form.

Opthos Inc. (www.opthos.com) at SUPERCOMM, meanwhile, will introduce its Opthos 1000, which it says is the first and only true optical system for the metropolitan core transport marketplace. At the show, Opthos will demonstrate interoperability at the optical transport level with metro access equipment vendors over a three-node ring. The company also will demonstrate its Instantaneous Wavelength Allocation, a technology that enables dynamic delivery of wavelengths instantaneously to any port of any node. Opthos says the delivery of its products promises to launch a new era of metropolitan services and render hybrid technologies and make OEO (optical-electrical-optical) solutions obsolete.

Also focusing on the metro space is ADVA, which will be launching the FSP2000, a 32-channel DWDM product that sits at the CPE and provides CPE-to-CPE services (for private LAN interconnection and storage connection applications within a campus or city) and is a feeder for metro access/metro core networks. This latest addition to the Fiber Service Platform family can be managed in-band for communications with the company's FSP3000 ring-based CO system for metro core metro access applications, says Brian McCann, chief officer of sales and marketing. The product, which will sell for less than $10,000 per application on both sides for DWDM, is expected to be generally available in July.

LuxN Inc. (www.luxn.com), which sells metro carriers optical transport solutions, also expects to make significant news at SUPERCOMM. The company already has a DWDM platform that delivers high bandwidth services to carriers and enterprises wanting to offer gigabit Ethernet (GigE) services, says Paul Zalloua, LuxN's director of product management. Now there's a need for taking those services from different metro access rings and intelligently muxing them to larger pipes, such as OC-192s, he says.

"Today we can go up to 16 wavelengths in access rings," he says. "As you move deeper into the network, wavelengths increase." To address that need for more wavelengths in PoP-to-PoP deployments, LuxN at SUPERCOMM will announce the WS 64000, which will support 64 wavelengths.

A second major product to be unveiled in Atlanta by LuxN will be the Optical Service Level Management System. Agnes Imregh, vice president of marketing, explains this high-level network management system offers an OSS mediation layer to integrate network management systems with other support systems from various vendors. The system allows a carrier to provision bandwidth dynamically. It employs in-band signaling and uses patented color sim technology to provide bit error rate information independent of the data. "We are the first and only vendor I know about that is able to provide information that lets carriers provide SLAs for any service that is carried on a wavelength," she says.

LuxN has also enhanced its systems to support a unidirectional path switched ring (UPSR), which enables a carrier to send information in both directions around a ring and pick the best payload of the two at the destination point.

Also to be shown at SUPERCOMM will be LuxN's coarse WDM WideWave product for carriers only going to one or two customers. It starts with two to four wavelengths per system and will eventually go up to eight. Another demo will feature 10-gig and OC-92 transport on its WavSystem product.

The Value Proposition

A message about services and profitability will be key to Nortel's strategy at SUPERCOMM, says Benoit Fleury, director of solutions marketing for Optical Internet at the vendor.

The company plans to highlight what it is doing to increase profitability at service providers from an optical standpoint, which includes driving bit management down; and increasing service provider revenues, by adding intelligence to the network, making it more dynamic and allowing the optical network to support new revenue-generating services. "At OFC we announced that, and we'll continue to convey that at SUPERCOMM: optics everywhere, intelligence throughout, unprecedented services," says Fleury. "That is the Optical Internet vision here going forward."

That vision encompasses Nortel's line of OPTera products, which includes a long-haul WDM solution, an optical switching device called OPTera Connect and OPTera packet products.

"On the WDM line side, there are 10-gigabit-based products and 40-gigabit-based products," Fleury adds. "Ten-gig has been already around, but we're enhancing with more bandwidth--160 wavelengths at 10gig and ultra-long reach to allow it to go thousands of kilometers without electrical regeneration." At OFC, Nortel announced its 40gig platform, which should be available later this year.

Also available later this year from Nortel will be a photonic switch, which the company expects to deliver more information about at SUPERCOMM. The company acquired the photonic switch technology through its recent Xros Inc. acquisition.

"A photonic switch is independent of bit-rate, so it's for massive scale [primarily in long-haul applications]," Fleury says. "Our next-gen of optical switch will support 40- and 80-gigabit-based interfaces." Nortel also has an OEO 40-gig switch, which was announced at OFC.

Finally, Nortel will talk at SUPERCOMM about end-to-end intelligence. That discussion will include information about Nortel's support of the automatically switched transport network (ASTN) standard being worked on by several standards group, which does optical signaling at the transport level for MPLS; OPTera's smart agent, which allows non-optical edge devices like routers, servers and storage devices to link into the optical network, not just from physical standpoint but from a signaling standpoint so they can access optical bandwidth; and a management layer to do end-to-end network and services management.

"You can offer managed wavelength services and stuff like that with this total system," Fleury says, and adds that some pieces of Nortel's end-to-end solution are available today and others will be announced later in the year. "At SUPERCOMM we'll provide more information behind those products."

Esmeralda Swartz, director of strategic marketing at Avici, says her company's message will coincide with what Avici has been talking to its customers about regarding its value proposition. And that is Avici's scalability story, she says. To Avici, scalability means a carrier can grow capacity in-service and add new services and features as needed with multiple boxes using one route table and a single network management system, says Swartz.

"Carriers want to collapse network layers and migrate to a converged IP services backbone to increase revenues," she says. "Also key is how do I beat my competitors to market with a new service--so quicker provisioning."

Swartz says cost, profit and velocity are the three tenets of Avici's message at SUPERCOMM. To emphasize the cost aspect, the vendor plans at SUPERCOMM to demo what it says is the world's largest router and its ability to act as single router no matter how many bays are interconnected. To highlight its profit message, the company will be showing end-to-end interoperability of a core router and an edge router to expedite delivery of converged services and SLA support. And to show velocity, Avici plans to show its TSR (terabit switch router) product's ability to be dynamically upgraded with added capacity as well as to have a demo running between the company's TSR and another vendor's optical switch via OIF UNI.

Avici Composite Links technology, which allows a carrier to take multiple physical connections and aggregate them to form a fatter pipe, also will be highlighted at the show. It can be used, for example, to trunk multiple OC-48s, or a combination of OCx connections, to create a bigger chunk of bandwidth and to allow for the immediate delivery of a new service, Swartz explains. The company also will demo its OC-768/40gig product that employs Composite Links, she adds.

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