DWDM: A Bandwidth Odyssey

Atlantech Finds DWDM Backbone Network Most Cost Effective Way to Support New Services

Infrastructure costs are a key area of concern when service providers look at ways to grow profitably – especially if they are required to lease fiber or circuits and have to balance profitability with offering the best value to their customers. One way to expand the capacity of a fiber network is by moving to dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) technology.

This was the approach taken by Washington, D.C.-based regional service provider Atlantech Online, as the company embarked on an ambitious strategy to expand its services.

Needing a Dramatic Bandwidth Expansion

Atlantech got its start in 1995 and has grown profitably since then by serving a customer base of federal agencies and small and large enterprise customers with transport services, leased wavelengths, point-to-point circuits, MPLS and datacenter collocation services. In the last several years, the company has grown these service offerings to include voice and storage area networking (SAN) services that were of keen interest to its customers.

Atlantech also saw that its IP-based voice and data services were showing enough growth that having native packet support on its backbone network was a key consideration. The company chose to replace the TDM technology with a DWDM system that would provide the bandwidth and scalability to allow it to offer a new Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) services. The addition of this service, on top of its growing voice business, meant that Atlantech needed a dramatic bandwidth expansion.

The company’s 300-km Gigabit Ethernet fiber-optic backbone ring connects its three points of presence in Arlington and Ashburn, Va., and Silver Spring, Md., allowing the carrier to offer its services throughout metropolitan Washington D.C. The ring was originally built using TDM, which had been the best way to facilitate the company’s primarily circuit-switched service offerings.

In addition to this network, the company leases lit fiber services, but as it considered its best infrastructure options for growth, it concluded that extensive leasing of additional lines was not a cost-effective alternative, so it needed another way to expand its network.

A Gradual Upgrade

One of the challenges of the process was that Atlantech’s initial analysis indicated that the company could get the bandwidth it needed just by aggregating together Gigabit Ethernet lines. That would save the company money on the project, but the technology team saw that a move to 10gbps transport speeds was on the horizon and it didn’t want to be shortsighted and lock out that possibility. Atlantech specified a system with small form factor pluggable (SFP), interfaces so that the carrier could upgrade on a per service basis, rather than have to convert the entire network at once or some other less granular way.

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines